By: Piper Anthony
The air had been thoroughly soaked through. There were officially more droplets in the air than there was breathable oxygen, and I knew I couldn’t take much more. I tried to love the rain, like I used to when I was just sad, but I was a different person. I felt sweet. until it started raining. The intrusive droplets no longer reminded me of stormy night time adventures or all of the times I scaled a wet tree just to see how different the view from Lisa’s place looked while it was wet. Three months ago, the rain started out as a light drizzle. Now the rain was overbearing. It made me angry—pure, undiluted anger. I once shied away from the lemon-tart sun, now I craved it. I wondered how much longer I would last.
I tugged on the strings to gather the hood of my scarlet raincoat and bunch it around my pale face. In a sidewalk puddle, I saw my reflection. It looked like some kind of miserable, red velvet cake that had been neglected with only a single dollop of cream cheese frosting plopped on top, right in the center. The thing is, no one really likes the taste of red velvet. They only like it because it’s pretty. An unsuspecting victim, new to the feigned delights of the red baked batter would be disappointed to indulge in a forkful, only to realize that the frosting was the best part; the rest was a disappointment.
As I approached the front yard that was too green and too soft, I saw them standing there, looking too green and too soft: my mother, and her kindness, which was so palpable that it often felt like its own entity entirely. There she was, immune to the rain and completely dry, dressed in her blue Cookie Monster apron. The one I picked out for her all those years ago. A droplet of rain splattered itself right across my brown sugar iris. I blinked, and she was gone. That same blue apron now lay where my mother had been a moment before.. It was soaked, pressed firmly into the mud, with long leaves of grass lounging on top of it. It suddenly occurred to me that Cookie Monster didn’t have decorative irises. He only had pupils, and I envied him.
Leaving the muppet in the mud, I passed by the side of the house and walked around towards the back door. I thought about how dry my mother had been when I saw her, just as she had been every day for the past three months. Each time she appeared to me outside of the home, the home in which she had baked all of her love into me. Each time she vanished and took her kindness with her. I really hated the rain. To make matters worse, for the first time, the back door was locked. I backed down from the steps and continued on around the house, making a complete circle before coming to a stop ahead of the front steps. I took a deep breath, accidentally inviting several raindrops into the depths of my lungs. Hacking them back up, I tasted a sweetness that was not pleasant the way sweetness should be. I prolonged my recovery to stall the trip to the front door. Eventually, I had to choose between the outside thing I hated, and the inside thing I hated.
When I got inside, he was standing by the couch, looking at me. Of course. He was always looking at me these days. There he stood in his white t-shirt, which was stained with a substance that might be unidentifiable to the distant eye. But I would know that natural gleam from a mile away. It was honey, glimmering golden or amber, depending on the thickness of the glob smeared across his chest. As I passed him to go into the kitchen, he seemed to become stickier with each passing step. The honey that had just been on his shirt was now dripping down the rest of him, slowly making its way towards his bear claw feet. With my red jacket now strung up on a hook next to the door, I looked more like angel food cake and my dad looked more like the devil’s.
In the kitchen, with its faded blue paint and its wooden cabinets chipping away at the corners, I felt at home. I looked inside a drawer where the knives should have been, but I found old floral contact paper that had begun to curl at the edges and form little ringlets. It looked like those chocolate spirals that bakers on The Food Network always added to the tops of sweet things in order to make them look nicer than they actually were. Apparently they were considered rational enough to be trusted with knives.
I grabbed the jar of peanut butter, and a spoon, since those were still around, and I dug in. I was just cramming the fourth spoonful into my mouth when I noticed a golden glob drop into my jar of peanut butter.My father stood over me;even his hair was covered in the stickiness. “I don’t want the kind with honey,” was all I said. He said nothing. I moved to the next rickety chair in order to escape his syrupy intrusion. But his eyes followed me, so I added “It’s disgusting.”
He wouldn’t halt his gaze, so I gathered my supplies and headed for the stairs. I found my room and collapsed onto my bed. I grabbed an old yellow radio from the side table, and shoved the earbuds in, trying to block out any noise except for whatever song would knead me to sleep. When I turned on the radio, though, no music played. It was all static. Every station. Even the AM talk radio was unlistenable. The strange thing was that there was no variety in the static. It all sounded exactly the same, at the same pitch, with the same SSSSHHHHHHH sound that the rain was making on the pavement outside. A slow, crawling sound. Goosebumps raised on my arms, and I felt surrounded.
Eventually, exhaustion overtook me, and the SSSSHHHHHHH was the soundtrack of my dreams. In my sleeping life, there were babies, trains, and even snakes. Though, there were no goo-goo-ga-gas or chugga-chugga-choo-choos or hiss-hisses. Every mouth, every creature, every movement made the same unsettling sound: SSSSHHHHHHH.
When I woke, there was a note on the stand next to me, written in my dad’s handwriting. It held two words: Jared called.
And, I couldn’t take it anymore.
My red coat remained on the hook as I bolted out of the front door. I looked back after several yards to see my dad standing in the doorway, only he was no longer dad; he was all honey, and I was going to be sick as the bees crawled around in the sockets where his eyeballs used to be. I raced faster and got to Lisa’s front yard, where I bolted up the tree, breaking several smaller twigs in my haste to get up quickly. When I got to the top, I saw that it was not just my home, but my whole town that had been covered in honey, caked in the slow-moving, deceptive substance. I turned to see Lisa, watching me from her murky window. Even from here, I saw that she, too, was honey. I couldn’t stand the sweetness as we all drowned.
Lisa’s front door was so squeaky that I could hear it, even beyond the rain, which had begun to pour down harder since I reached the highest branch.
“Hey, Éclair! Wanna come down so we can talk?” she called to me. I couldn’t pretend I didn’t hear her. She was right beneath me now, waiting to catch me if I fell. It was a habit of hers that she developed after the one time I actually did fall. One out of a hundred. I had only sprained an ankle, but they all still called me Honey.
“Stop calling me that.”
“What? I can’t hear you from way up there!” More lies. Her hearing had always been better than any person I had ever known. It was almost scary. Lisa never missed a thing. If you were in the same building as she was, and you sneezed, she would hear the sneeze and know you were the one who did it.
Lisa knew.
“I said stop calling me that!” I shouted with difficulty, as the honey rain was beginning to come down in buckets, washing over me like glaze washed over a freshly baked doughnut. I saw it clearly now. From up here, I saw that the sky itself appeared to be melting into shimmery, edible gold. The dense and sticky substance oozed down my hair, which was naturally golden in color. Was I predestined to be this way? I sighed, and then, with ease, found my way down to the ground. Rain or no rain, my body knew this tree well enough to guide itself. When I got to the ground, Lisa was waiting, her lips formed into a wide grin. Her face was textured, and the tinted rain stuck to her like toffee stuck to teeth. She looked like cornbread.
“What should I call you then? Essence Claire? I know how much you dislike your name, sweetie pie. I am only trying to be considerate. Besides, that’s what I’ve always called you.”
At that, I plopped down in the mud. Knees bent, my head found my palms.
“I wish everyone would stop trying to be so ‘considerate.’And, no, that’s not what you’ve always called me. If by ‘always,’ you mean for the past few months, then yes. If by ‘always,’ you mean for the thirteen years that I have known you, then no. So, again, stop calling me that.”
“…I was only trying to be considerate.” She repeated, sounding slightly defeated. Of course, this was only temporary, as her next sentence was so jarringly upbeat and full of excitement that it gave me an instant headache: “Want to go to Mrs. Butterworth’s?!” She nearly shouted it. She sounded thrilled, and I wanted to cry. “They’ve got a new recipe they’re testing out. The cherry pie is supposed to be even better than it was before, if you can believe it. Sweeter.”
“I don’t want to do anything, Lisa.”
There was a pause that was barely long enough to be noticeable, but I did notice it.
“Then, why did you come here?” Her voice again betrayed that same defeated tone that I knew she instantly regretted. She wasn’t the only one with a regret.
“I don’t know.” I had been asking myself the same question from atop the tree. I uncovered my eyes and looked at the ground surrounding me. The honey had almost completely covered my legs by this point. It was coming down harder than it had at any point since it first started. As to the rain, Lisa seemed unbothered.
“Jared will be there!” She said it the way she used to tell my mother that her cake was “really delicious, Mrs. Watkins!”
My head shot up instantly.
“Are you insane?!” Now I was the one shouting. I stood up, straining against the viscosity of the glutinous flood. “Are you actually insane? Is everyone in this town insane?!”
Lisa shrugged meekly, as if I had somehow become the offensive one. She looked deflated, like a fallen cake that still hoped it could rise again if I shut the oven door quickly enough. She said nothing.
“You know what he did to me! Everyone knows what he did to me! Why do you keep trying to shove him down my throat?!” I choked on the last words, but I was afraid to cry. Afraid that my tears, too, would be made of honey. So, I tried patting down my emotions, like I had been doing for months. Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker’s woman.
“Look, Jared’s a nice guy. If he really did do something wrong, I’m sure he just didn’t realize…”
She trailed off again, and in that moment, looking into Lisa’s eyes, I mourned for the first time since the attack. I grieved for each of my losses. First my mom, then my dad, now Lisa.
If.
“Do you even hear yourself?” It was my turn to sound defeated. I wondered if anyone would mourn for me.
Lisa, forcing herself into silence, went to hug me instead. I stumbled away and fell back into the bee’s mud. Then, the hot tears came. They ran quickly down my face, and when they reached my lips, I allowed them inside. With a great sense of relief, I tasted saltiness. It cut through me the way knives slice through cake, the way the sun slashed through the clouds at that very moment, and it was glorious. I let the tears flow freely. There was hope for me, yet.
