The sun hides behind big clouds. The air is thick and loamy and we think it’s going to rain. The ground sinks and sand pours into our holey shoes and my younger sisters and me, we cry.
“Hush up NOW,” Ma says. She has taken us to a special place, the place where Ma told Aunty Zahra over the phone that she was going to “escape de madness” at home, the place where she’d said yes to Pa and left her dancing dreams for reality so long ago.
“Fawn! Take yo sista’s han’!” Roshawna falls towards me under the momentum of Ma’s shove and I grab her hand. She pulls along Odessa, who sucks her thumb. And little Gelisa lies asleep in Ma’s arms like a rotten sack of potatoes.
The road is beautiful, but it is long. Tall green fronds wave from thin brown heights, but there is almost no breeze, so I wonder how they can do that. I imagine us through the eyes of people in their air-conditioned cars: a tall brown woman (skin so smooth despite her fat husband and the troubled years and her headaches) and her thin, beautiful children, all walking straight with Taino pride.
“Come ON!” yells Ma, who rakes her wild hair and struts faster and faster. She is almost running, and the three of us have to pump our linked arms and kick our knobby knees to keep up with her. She is a livid sandstorm in front of us, a fury in torn stockings and a faded jean skirt. When finally we stop, we are exhausted.
“Here,” she quips, putting Gelisa down, ignoring the desperate pants of our eight, six, five, and two-year-old lungs. “Stay here.” A hot wind brushes our wooly black heads and runs searing fingers through our threadbare cotton casuals. She looks us over from me, the oldest, to Roshawna and Odessa and Gelisa. Ma’s eyebrow is terrible; it is raised and it trembles and below, her chapped lips are pursed. Ma winces — I think she bit her tongue — and she sucks her cheeks. Somewhere, a frog croaks loudly.
And she leaves us.
“Here” is a babbling fountain of muddy water rushing down weathered concrete slabs surrounded by red leaves and thin leaves and tall trees and green foliage that tickle us as we splash about in the water impatiently. Our yellowed white socks brown quickly and the deserted air fills with the rare laughter of the Redwood children.
An hour passes. We crane our necks in the direction that Ma walked away and continue to wait. But Gelisa is young and delicate and she cries. I understand; we were hungry before we left our small, dirty room, but Ma had shushed us so we’d ignored the familiar emptiness. I’m the big sister, so I bend to comfort her. Soon Roshawn and Odessa start bawling, and I can’t help joining them. We cry, unleashing salty torrents of emotion. And still Ma is nowhere to be seen.
Then, it begins to happen.
At first I don’t notice the magic because all of us are shrinking and we are so tired and dirty that the widening horizon and dwindle of our footprints on the soil don’t matter. But soon, my neck is thick. I turn and the motion requires my cheeks, which have ballooned sideways past redemption, and my flat shoulders, which now poke forwards where my nipples used to be. Mutinous black pebbles scale my slimy tan hide and I tingle with billions of itches, which, unfortunately, my webbed digits lack the fingernails to scratch. My back peels at the malevolent heat and I motion to my sisters to hide in the shade.
One day, when Pa had a job, he told us a story at dinnertime about little brown frogs that croaked too much. “Poor tings — dey’s pickin who bin left by dey madda.” And we’d giggled and thrown trusting grins at Ma who smiled thinly.
Now, the sky is wider than we’ve ever seen it, and the sky is so blue as to swallow us whole. The sun is white and ruthless and we wish that it would rain. The ground has dried and dust billows into our tiny nostrils and all of us, four girls, our only response is to croak. Because despite our new bodies, we still think of ourselves as such: four girls; Jamaicans. We are hungry. The croaking bloats apart the pasty emptiness in our stomachs and now all we have is each other. I’m still the big sister. And I wonder, as do we all, where she went to.
Omenka Helen Uchendu is a freshman at Emory University pursuing a Creative Writing and Biology double-major. She plans to attend medical school and become an obstetrician. Writing, however, has always been her first passion and she wants to share her literary creations with as many people as possible! God Bless!
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14 Responses to “WITHOUT RAIN • by Omenka Helen Uchendu”
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March 15th, 2009 at 3:10 am
[...] WITHOUT RAIN ? by Omenka Helen Uchendu | Every Day Fiction – The … By admin Omenka Helen Uchendu is a freshman at Emory University pursuing a Creative Writing and Biology double-major. She plans to attend medical school and become an obstetrician. Writing, however, has always been her first passion and she … Every Day Fiction – http://www.everydayfiction.com/ & [...]
March 15th, 2009 at 3:21 am
I lost track of the story due having to plough through a plethera of adjectives.
Also, there was some strange imagery abounding, such as:
“like a rotten sack of potatoes”
“skin so smooth despite her fat husband”
and
“Ma’s eyebrow is terrible”
Sorry! This wasn’t for me.
March 15th, 2009 at 4:08 am
I thought this was a very powerful story and I enjoyed the move from reality to fantasy. It packed a punch.
I must apologise though – I wanted to give it 4 stars and that was what I thought I had but when the system sorted itself out it appears to have only acknowledged a 2 star vote. Many apologies for this – as it definitely deserves a 4 and upward.
!!!
Axxx
March 15th, 2009 at 6:26 am
I liked this. Some wonderful imagery throughout. A great, emotional outing for my imagination.
Greta
March 15th, 2009 at 6:30 am
This story begins as a beautifully realized landscape with “Ma,” whose background the writer has finely developed, and her many children walking through it. It would seem that it is a story of abandonment after Pa lost his job and Ma decides to end her troubled years; a story of kitten drowning by the mother and father, a couple of shushers–until the paragraph beginning with “At first I don’t notice” which includes an account of the older daughter’s cheeks ballooning past redemption and the fine and admirable offspring at the story beginning turning into frogs. This paragraph and later seems tacked on, to derive from other story and lead to another, not a denouement of the original idea. There seems to be evasion of the horrors people actually suffer by such easy devices as supernatural transmutation, etc.
Despite the unusually excellent beginning, I rated it low because of the split.
March 15th, 2009 at 7:36 am
I thought this was an excellent story, and really well written.
This is beautiful:
“A hot wind brushes our wooly black heads and runs searing fingers through our threadbare cotton casuals.”
I loved the beginning, was admittedly surprised by the end, but suspect there are more layers of meaning here than first meets the eye, and found it all in all very moving.
March 15th, 2009 at 7:37 am
P.S. It was a five from me which I don’t give out easily.
March 15th, 2009 at 10:51 am
I read another story, not too long ago with the same name, “Without Rain” but with a somewhat different development although there were overlaps. This story is superior to the first one I read and although it is less of a landscape and less of a development of the mother’s background, it concentrates more heavily on the family’s suffering hunger. This story too, ends in the youngsters turning into frogs, a development which I can’t connect with the rest of the story. “To croak” is a vernacular phrase meaning to die, but I still don’t see that becoming frogs pulls together with the hunger or the death. Maybe there is a Jamaican tradition unknown to me which pulls it tighter. I like this version of the story better, though.
March 15th, 2009 at 2:28 pm
This was excellent, Omenka. From that first croak of a bullfrog the girls heard to their terror at being abandoned- just as in their old Pa’s story, turning into frogs themselves.
The dialogue was marvelous use of the vernacular–loved, “take yo sista’s han’!” brought back memeories…
anyways, it’s 5*’s from me.
–dj
March 16th, 2009 at 2:10 am
I also didn’t care for the “rotten sack of potatoes”, why rotten? I enjoyed the reading of it, however, without really thinking much of it as a “story”.
March 16th, 2009 at 4:09 am
Beautiful and sad story. Enjoyed it, Omenka.
“Sack of rotten potatoes” seems tobe a misplaced eithet since the story is not told from Ma’s point of view but the eldest daughter, Fawn’s, who is sympathetic to her siblings.
March 16th, 2009 at 7:40 am
The rhythm and unique culture of this story were done very nicely. I’m very sad at what happened to the girls, and, along with them, I wonder where their mother has gone.
March 16th, 2009 at 12:16 pm
Interesting. The story had surreal quality, making some parts hard to comment on.
This was my thought: the girls revert back to their frog form to escape some sort of danger (“escape da madness”). Some species of frogs burrow down in the mud to survive drought or to hibernate (possibly famine?), and this was essentially what the girls are getting ready to do.
I got a little hung up on the story that is related as told by Pa. I didn’t get it and Pa’s story seemed relevant to the girls current situation.
March 17th, 2009 at 11:07 am
I really loved this story, the imagery was brilliant and the plot was stunning. I gave it a five. I really loved the way the story started out almost as a tragedy and than morphed into something wlse, with the girls turning into frogs. I also really liked that the girls turning into frogs was part of story the girls had been told.