Rain

It was a rainy day, and I left my book outside on the table in the rain. The book, a novel, was titled Rain. What’s more, an incident in the book concerned a book that was left outside on a table in the rain.

In the book, the main character, a woman, looks out her kitchen window to see the novel she’s reading being ruined by rain. The book in the rain is a mystery novel. The woman looking out the window was devouring the pages as she neared the truth at the heart of the mystery. When she had to stop reading in order to make dinner for her family, she absentmindedly left the book on the table and later it began to rain.

The woman in the book conducts her life on a quiet underground channel of thought. She likes to stay home while everyone else is out. She’s prone to fantasies about a different life, but wakes up every day to go through her routine.

Something strikes her when she looks out the window and sees her book being ruined by the rain. The book has swelled to twice its size, the pages bloated, glued together, the ink probably bleeding. How easily the book, which had been a story, has become something else, a soggy object. All it took was for the book to be exposed to the weather.

The night before, when everyone was asleep, she’d walked around the house trying to find the book. She’d turned on the outside light and stood looking through the glass at the illuminated patio table where the book was being ruined by the rain. In the morning, in the continuing rain, the book was hardly a book anymore—it practically dripped off the table.

The woman understood that she was going to do something ruinous.

That was the point when I had to stop reading myself—my husband and son were back from the playground. I turned down a corner to mark my place and set the book on the patio table.

And the book with the woman who was going to do something ruinous was ruined by the rain.

What to do with such a coincidence? Where to put it? I didn’t know, don’t know, so I’m putting it here. Maybe I’ll print out this page and set it outside to be rained on, completing a circle.