Rain in Los Angeles, Emily Piccard

Rain in Los Angeles

I feel the swell of rain beneath my skin. In a city like this, where buildings and streets are bleached white animal bones beneath the sun, rain is an entity, a deity privately worshipped, mentioned in passing, in wistful tones. And when it does rain, people forget themselves. Two Februarys ago, when the skies were like smudged charcoal for weeks, the scream of sirens kept me awake at night. People forgot how to drive; it might have been scrims of black ice slicking our roads—for all of our sullenness, the hollow feeling behind ones’ breastbone, we might have been Alpine villagers mired in an endless winter. There is neither promise nor suggestion of rain now; noon, and the sun is a scalded dime dropped at its zenith. Restless twitches beneath the bones of my feet and I walk, am propelled outside and down the boulevard to the street. Men and women and their sad-eyed children slump on plastic benches outside the Family Clinic on the corner. As I pass, a fresh-faced nurse in blue scrubs—eyes shining; she hasn’t seen too much yet—materializes in the dim doorway and beckons. Teen mother rising from the bench, skinny infant limp in her arms, and I wonder where the father is now. How did she feel when she turned her eyes downward and saw the thin blue line? Did she feel a jolt of sick shock—the realization that there was something infinitely growing within her? Was she standing alone? Was there a boy hanging over her shoulder, praying, fingers maybe finding the rosary or cross under his shirt and then dropping it, letting the worn beads slide from forefinger and thumb, fighting off the numbing washes of shock, maybe encroaching hopelessness. She disappears into the antiseptic-scented gloom with the baby crying weakly in her arms, and I am already moving off, down the street. I could walk five blocks down, to the pier, and watch the dark shapes of surfers dip and bob against the green swell of waves, or catch the 12:15 Blue Line north to Santa Monica, a haven of green parks and quiet streets,

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or east—downtown, maybe, and walk among the loom of skyscrapers in a glittering evening, all of those lights spinning above your head, the heartbeat of the city is dizzying. A homeless man on the corner of 4th and Main waves me over to the bus bench. I don’t move. —You’re stepping on the cracks. —What cracks? —The sidewalk cracks. You’re stepping on them. I say, oh, and I walk quickly to the drug store. Last week, the girl in the neighboring building was knifed at the bus station on Wilshire, coming home from summer school. In this city, there’s always the urban legend: the boy who was kidnapped on the Venice boardwalk and sold into child slavery, the college student who, wildly, unabashedly drunk, got George Clooney’s name tattooed across her forehead, and there’s always the friend-of-a-friend who got raped in the bathrooms at Griffith Park. At the counter, I pay for a can of ice tea and a pack of mint gum. This sun is too blinding, bright, close. Sky burned white and blue and white again, stretched tight across the horizon like Saran wrap over the top of a cooking bowl, and the space behind my eyes aches from all of this brightness; I am the first man—the first girl—to stagger from my Stone Age cave, squinting, into the sunlight. I need the rain; I need gray days when the sky drops down to brush the rooftops, days when headlights and taillights slant through curtains of rain, days when my heart will lighten as alleyways flood, when the apartment will be warm and dry and the outside world a stark contrast. I need to breathe in rain clouds and exhale all of this city’s smog.

Emily Piccard ’14

12 Pillars of Salt