On Break

A Bad Rain is on temporary break. I started this project to see if it was possible to write a daily serial in real time. My verdict after one week: No.

I still plan to publish the story in its entirety here, but I now see that I will need to write the whole thing first. This is not the way all web serials have to work, but it is the only way I can see to do this story justice. Please stay tuned to the Twitter or Facebook pages (links on the sidebar) or subscribe via RSS to receive notification when the story starts up again.

Chapter 1, Part 5

An hour later, back in the cocoon of her car, Jeana flipped down the sun visor and checked herself out in its mirror, making sure that any evidence of Brad had been cleared away. She was about to shift the car in reverse and pull out of the parking spot, when she remembered her buzzing phone. Two messages, the blinking screen said.

“Hey, it’s me. My grandmother has to go to the hospital. Her hand is tingling or something. She says it feels like it’s burning so we’re just going to get it checked out. Wanted to let you know in case you got home and were worried that we weren’t there.”

Delete. Next.

“Hey, me again. I forgot to say something in the last message. I love you.”

Jeana snapped the phone shut and tossed it onto the passenger seat like it was toxic. She raised her head and blinked quickly, daring the accumulating tears to roll down her cheeks. Stupid Nicholas, she thought. She tore out of the parking lot, faster than was safe, but it was late and no one was around. And when she wound her way through the industrial office park and got to the intersection of the road leading towards town, she stopped at the light. To turn left would bring her to the hospital, to turn right would take her home, to an empty house.

She turned right.

And she didn’t think anything more of it until she took the back stairway up to their apartment, opened the door, and saw a beat up pair of brown Asics in a heap on the ground. Nicholas’ shoes. The ones he wore everyday. He had left with his grandmother so quickly that he hadn’t even bothered to change out of his scummy house shoes. Probably hadn’t even given it a second thought. That was when Jeana really felt like shit.

Chapter 1, Part 4

Jeana used her employee key to enter the back door. It was late and the warehouse was nearly empty. If this were November, the middle of the holiday season, the warehouse and call center would be buzzing with the activity of taking and filling orders for hungry customers. But on a hot night in August, there was no reason for most people to stay late. Just the skeleton crew on the phones until 11, when they’d close for the night and let the answering machine take care of the rest for the next nine hours.

Jeana slunk into the cheese cave that wasn’t actually a cave, just a small, climate controlled room with no windows and one entrance where they kept the stinkiest, most expensive cheeses. She pulled out a towel from beneath the rack of Camembert, rolled it out in a clear space of floor and unbuttoned her shorts.

Brad entered still in his apron and baseball cap, a sexier alternative to the hairnet, and shut the door behind him. Jeana shivered.

“I wish we could meet somewhere else. I always feel like we’re going to get trapped in here.”

“Would that be so bad? We’ve got food.” He pointed to her thighs, vibrating with each ring of her phone. “You’ve got cell service.”

Jeana retrieved her phone and silenced the ringer. “We’ve got cheese. Stinky, runny, moldy cheese. And minimal ventilation.” She pushed down her shorts and stepped out of them, putting herself just in front of him. She reached out and took off his hat, smoothed the low brown bangs- so different from Nicholas’ thick black dreads, over his eyes. Brad closed his eyes and enjoyed the sensation.

“What’d he do this time?” Brad asked.

“He ditched me for his grandmother,” Jeana pouted.

Eyes still closed, Brad raised his eyebrows. “And that made you mad?”

“That made me horny,” Jeana said. She grabbed Brad by the strings of his apron and pulled him to the ground on top of her, ignoring the soft buzzing of her phone, buried in the cloth of her shorts. Probably Nicholas, she thought. But she didn’t answer. Her boyfriend could wait.

Chapter 1, Part 3

“Yeah,” Nicholas smiled. “Nice. You remember what that means.”

He got up from the chair, cringing a little at the squeak of plastic. Jeana hopped up onto the kitchen counter and opened her arms and legs to him. Nicholas fit into the empty space, but not before shooting a look at the open basement door, and pressed against her in a way that made them both sigh.

“Keep me safe in the storm?” Jeana said, her voice barely above a whisper.

She bit her bottom lip and put a hand in the waistband of his jeans, while a low tree branch thumped rhythmically against a window, buffeted by the strong winds. When Nicholas groaned into her ear and pushed against her, she grazed the bare skin of his hip with her fingertips, then moved her hand around to the front, and thrust it deeper.

Nicholas gasped and pushed away, “My grandmother.” He’d taken a step back but Jeana’s hands remained in his pants.

“I told you, I experimented in college, but Hattie’s not my type,” Jeana smirked. She was bent forward at the waist, holding onto him like a trapeze artist reaching for her swing. Jeana hooked her fingers through his belt loops and tugged, but Nicholas didn’t move.

“I’m serious. I should check on her,” he grasped both of her wrists in one hand, she hated when he did that, and pulled them away from him. He moved toward the basement door, but Jeana didn’t budge. “You coming?”

Jeana glanced over her shoulder and outside, where the rain and wind had let up. Suddenly, she wanted to be anywhere but here. “I’m gonna go to the warehouse.”

“Are you kidding me? We have to clean the basement.”

“Yeah, I know but,” she gave him a curt peck on the cheek and scooted around him out the back door. “I have to pick something up at work. You guys start without me, I’ll be back in an hour.”

Before he could protest, she was out the door and inside their little hatchback, the one with the discolored front panel from when they had to get it replaced and couldn’t find a matching paint color. She started the car, released the parking brake, but then she waited for a few seconds. Just to see if he would come after her.

She opened her phone, scrolled to the recently dialed numbers, and selected the first name on the list, Brad.

“Hey, I was able to get away,” She clicked on the wipers to clear away the soft drizzle accumulating on the windshield. The back door of the house remained closed. “Meet me at our spot in ten minutes.”

Chapter 1, Part 2

Stray cats weren’t an uncommon sight in this neighborhood, Carrieton, which boasted some of the highest property values in the city. But it was also the site of numerous student houses, created by chopping up once grand single family homes into small, overpriced apartments.

The corner of Fountain and Wayne, where the Washington house stood, was the epicenter of the student ghetto. Though Hattie Washington had lived there for over fifty years, and invested much of her and her husband’s (may he rest in peace) own sweat in her home’s renovation and maintenance, her underage neighbors had no such interest. With parents paying the bills and landlords several cities, sometimes several states away, piles of trash, food, old clothing, and old furniture took up permanent residence in many back yards. It was a good place to be a stray cat.

Nicholas gagged and pushed his way back up the stairs, the sound of the storms and the siren tumbled all around them, like a pair of jeans in a near-empty dryer. Hattie Washington, who had been at the rear of the line, asked what all the fuss was about.

“Don’t go in there, Grandma Hattie. It stinks,” Nicholas wiped his mouth with the corner of his shirt and went to the sink. He filled his cupped hands with cool water and rinsed out his mouth, then, with a little jostling, opened the window and brought his head as close to the screen as possible, breathing in the fresh, wet rain smell.

She sniffed the air, “I don’t smell anything.”

Jeana stifled a laugh. Of course she didn’t smell anything, hadn’t smelled anything or tasted anything in twenty years. It was a wonder she still had her hearing.

She let the smile fall from her face when Nicholas took a seat at the linoleum kitchen table in front of her. The plastic seat squeaked beneath him.

“Step aside, child. Let Grandma Hattie take a look.”

The three of them were pinched in the small opening between the corner of the counter, the back door, and the kitchen table. Hattie Washington tried to maneuver her way around, but her generous behind jostled Jeana.

“’Scuse me, honey,” she said and turned back in the direction of the basement door.

Jeana rolled her eyes at the old woman’s retreating figure and made an exaggerated movement with her arm, After you.

“Be nice,” Nicholas hissed.

“Nice,” Jeana repeated, pursing her lips. The word rolled off her tongue like it was coated in lemon juice.

Chapter 1, Part 1

It was one of the hottest summers on record. Sticky, humid, lazy weather. Go-see-a-crappy-movie-just-to-sit-in-A/C-for-two-hours kind of weather. Eat a sit-down dinner in a mediocre restaurant to avoid returning to a hot, hot house and the little box fan that kicks up more noise than air. But with the heat, come the storms, fifteen tornadoes in June alone. And numerous thunderstorms, tornadoes in training, that only take down trees and power lines instead of entire buildings. There was even talk of something called a derecho. Wikipedia called it “a widespread and long-lived, violent convectively induced straight-line windstorm that is associated with a fast-moving band of severe thunderstorms in the form of a squall line usually taking the form of a bow echo.” The residents of Arborville, Michigan called it a pain in their ass.

It’s not that these residents were hardy, sun-scorched, tough-it-out kind of folk. Not even. More people in Arborville owned smart phones than pick up trucks. And the main movie theater in town, the one built in 1927 and lovingly restored to its former glory by a group of concerned citizens, was more likely to show a foreign film sans subtitles than anything requiring 3D glasses.

No, it wasn’t that Arborvillians were so confident in their ability to deal with the storm, one way or another, when or if it arrived. It was that the sirens sounded so goddamn often that most people ignored simply them. Tuning them out, as if they were the sounds of a passing fire truck, on its way to some emergency on the other side of town.

But not Jeana Saito.

Jeana Saito lived on the top floor of a hundred year old house less than half a mile from downtown with her fiancé, Nicholas. His grandmother, Hattie Washington, was their landlady and downstairs neighbor. And on this night, when Jeana heard the siren she rounded up the Washingtons and they wove their way through Hattie’s cluttered old-lady kitchen to the painted yellow door that was the entrance to the basement. As soon as Nicholas opened the door, the smell hit them. He flipped the switch. The light illuminated the darkened space, and the sight hit them.

In every direction. As far as the eye could see, stray cats. Every single one, dead.