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Heavy Rain

by TJ Price

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I’m standing in the doorway where you last stood before you got up on a chair, slipped the belt around your throat like a necktie, and kicked the chair out from under you.

I imagine for the hundredth time how you expired, gasping like a fish in the air. Shitting yourself. Pissing yourself. Twisting like a windchime in a gale.

Two months have passed, and I still cannot entirely scrub the stains from the floor.

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Our life was golden. Well, maybe a little tarnished around the edges. We still clasped one another in the evening hours. We still smiled when we talked, held our sides when we laughed, when we shared our inside jokes.

But you didn’t like to have sex, and I did. I found other men. You didn’t like to do much with your body. You started moving away from me whenever I touched you, like I repulsed you, or maybe you knew what I was doing.

So you hit fast-forward on your life, you wanted to see the credits roll. You wanted the fade to black, the stippling darkness, the sudden blast of white on the projector screen as the movie ended.

You hated yourself more than I could love you.

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Since you took my heart and then fled to a place where I could never get it back, I took the pruning shears from the shed in our apartment building’s little backyard, and I snipped off your left index finger.

Everyone thought it was something you did, before you killed yourself. Something bizarre, a kind of inexplicable symbol.

Where did it go? they all asked. The men in uniform scoured the garbage, the apartment. They asked me, when they thought they could slip it into conversation between the “I’m sorry” and the “for your loss.”

I told them that’s how I found you: minus one finger. When they found the pruning shears in the shed, still stained ruddy with your blood, they assumed you did it to yourself.

“What pain he must have been in,” your best friend from work whispered to me at the funeral. It was meant to be some kind of sympathy, but it came off like a headline ripped from the tabloids.

Other than work, you preferred to keep to yourself. You liked a small crew: the smallest was you and me and the dog. Even the dog’s gone now, too. Couldn’t stand to look at her anymore. A nice family took her in.

She’s romping on a farm somewhere, I’m sure.

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I read about how to preserve your finger online. It’s in a Mason jar, screwed tightly shut, full of what the Internet calls “strong water,” which is water with a lot of grain alcohol in it. The finger does not float. It leans against the side of the glass, pointing towards Heaven. It is crooked slightly, too, as if it is saying “come hither.”

I keep your finger next to our bed, on your nightstand, so I can see it any time I want. When I can’t sleep, I focus on the whorls of your fingerprint, or the flaking keratin of your nail. You never had much in the way of nails, being an inveterate chewer, but after death, the nail has grown.

I’ve looked it up, though. The nail isn’t growing, it’s that the skin is shrinking back from the nailbed. It just looks like it’s growing.

And I can’t stop sighing, or crying. I keep typing out texts to Chelsea, my friend, even when she’s at work, and then deleting the text before I send it. These are invariably a combination of Help me or Today is a bad day or I can’t stop crying or I saw his ghost today.

The last one is a lie. I’ve never seen your ghost, but I’ve tried to convince myself that I have.

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When the rain starts, I am thinking about how the weather has been so strange lately. Thunderstorms, big enough that the knick-knacks on the shelves jostle one another in fear. The temperature is chilly in the morning, but brutally humid by mid-day. The world can’t take any more moisture: it is an over-filled sponge, leaking out around the edges.

To make things worse, last night the air conditioner gave a big rattletrap sigh and quit on me. I’ve thrown open all the windows to their fullest, gaping out on the world like yawn-stuck mouths. The heat of the day has stealthily crept in, too, its cloying humidity as predatory as kudzu vines. When an errant breeze kicks up, I stop and close my eyes for a moment, relishing the ephemeral coolness as long as I can.

Splat.

I open my eyes. Something has hit the floor and rolled under the cabinets in the kitchen, and left a translucent, jellied stain, along with a bright red smear.

The most logical solution is the obvious one. I stick my head out the window, casting about this way and that, trying to find the culprit. Someone’s playing jokes, tossed something in through the window, as odd of an angle as it is.

It’s either that, or something has fallen from the sky.

I turtle my head back inside and hunt for the invader, getting down on my hands and knees and following the red smear it’s left behind. I press my face onto the cool linoleum to see what it is.

To this day, I still wonder which of us saw each other first.

The intruding object looks like a peeled, squashed grape, with a milky film like a mold saddling the middle of it. It’s peculiarly white, from what I can see. I pull back from the dark recess, my bile rising, before I look again to confirm what I have seen.

It’s an eyeball. I almost expect it to blink, as if it’s as stupefied to see me as I am to see it.

Outside: a low grumble of thunder, like a sentinel guard dog issuing a warning, and the sound of wet, descending from the clouds.

I reach under the cabinet and draw the eyeball out. It’s slimy against my fingers, trailing a bit of its ocular nerve, like a little braided tail. The iris, though cloudy, is strikingly familiar.

In fact, you had eyes that were just this color. Deep blue, but green too, like the ocean before a thunderstorm.

A car alarm goes off somewhere nearby, wailing like a disturbed infant, piercing and shrill. Someone screams, and for a moment, the two sounds intertwine in a ghastly weave before the screaming stops, as abruptly as someone pulling the plug on a sound effects tape.

I set the eyeball down on the counter and turn to look outside again, concerned.

The rain continues. It thuds against the roof, and I think: hail?, but then the noise shifts, unutterably. It sounds like when you used to pound at the steaks with your fists to tenderize them. Wham. Wham. Wham.

Something flashes by the window, something bulky and large, like a wrapped package from the butcher’s. I think: who is throwing meat off of the roof? It’s big enough to be a leg of lamb, or an unbroken set of ribs.

A moment passes, and another object whizzes by outside. I hesitantly creep towards the window.

There, caught by the railing of the fire escape and dangling like a bizarre ornament, is a severed leg. It’s cut off crudely somewhere above the knee, with a great chunk of thigh still attached, and, judging by the amount of hair on the calf and shin, it’s a man’s leg. The skin has a ruddy glow to it, as if recently amputated.

As I stare at it, completely mesmerized by the sight, I notice another strangeness: the street below is littered with body parts, as though God has grown angry with his dolls and dismembered them all over the neighborhood. There are arms up to the shoulder; hands, splayed out like fallen leaves; a foot here; a torso there. Scattered around are clumps of nameless flesh and gristle, strips of muscle and fascia, gleaming like wet seashells in the dim afternoon.

I do what anyone would do. I do what you would do. I twist around and look up.

The clouds are gray and black, like ink droplets in curdled milk. The wind is ghastly and hot, like the humid breath of an abattoir. I recoil in disgust, back inside the apartment, and not a moment too soon.

That insistent, arrhythmic pounding on the roof becomes louder, even thunderous, and for a moment I mistake it for applause.

But it is not applause. It is the sound of things collapsing; the sound of ruin.

I wonder where you are before I remember you’re dead, and then the deluge begins.

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It lasts for approximately ten minutes before the body parts stop raining from the sky, but it takes much, much longer than that to get over the shock of what’s happened. When the kitchen window shatters from a dismembered arm, fingers grasping at me as if it is alive, I admit it—I turn and flee, out into the hallway, down the two flights of stairs to the front lobby, to look out at the world through the small window in the door.

I watch as someone running is struck down by a chunk of tissue that seems half-formed, glistening in the light. They are knocked to the side, their head splitting against the corner of a building in a red splatter. Cars careen to the sides of the road, barking up stoops and crashing into the front of the buildings opposite. Alarms wail, barely audible over the sounds of the fleshy rain. Thud, thud, thwap. Glass shatters. Horns blare.

As the alien downpour finally ceases, I cautiously open the front door. A severed hand falls from the awning and splats to the concrete right in front of me. I notice that one of its fingernails is oozing blood into the crescent of its cuticle, as if recently chewed.

Everywhere, there is ruin and wreckage: blood-stained people lifting themselves up from prone positions on the sidewalks, wrestling with limbs and other fleshly encumbrances. Some come out from recessed entrances, fearful eyes trained on the gloomy sky above.

The power lines sag from their poles, fizzing and sparking, some of the wires bent down to the street, and everywhere, there is a dense stillness, a shared quiet that reverberates from panicked eye to panicked eye. No one is quite sure what to do. Who to call.

I think about checking my phone, but when I reach into my pocket, I realize I’ve left it upstairs.

From the distance, a siren, getting closer. I tense up, unexpectedly reminded of the night I found you hanging in our doorway. After I took the shears to your hand.

It was only fair.

But then I called the police, and I remember hearing that same lonely siren uncurling from the seethe and buzz of the city, homing in on me, and, I suppose, you, as your lumpen body swayed from side to side.

Someone is crying. Someone else is screaming. It could be me. It feels like a bomb has gone off, or some hideous artifact of war has landed in the middle of the street, with all the assorted, blood-spattered bits of bodies lying about. Manna from heaven for cannibals, I think to myself.

Where has this rain of flesh come from? Surely not heaven. Surely not the clouds. Even now, they are shifting, disassembling, letting the fury of the summer sun beat down on the scene below. The storm, such as it was, did nothing to dispel the sticky humidity, and a scent of iron weighed down the air. On the wrought-iron fence, a foot is pierced through the middle, like stigmata.

A woman is crouched over someone else, just down the sidewalk. The would-be rescuer is open-mouthed, staring at me, shouting something in Spanish. In one hand, she holds a detached arm at the elbow, waving its hand at me as if trying to get my attention. The fingers at the end of the arm wiggle—all except for one.

The arm is missing a finger. An index finger.

I go to the woman, walking towards her in a daze. She is yelling at me, gesturing to the crumpled, unmoving figure on the asphalt even as she is getting up, hurrying down the street away from us, leaving the severed arm behind. I think about yelling after her, but I swallow it instead. What good can I do for this poor sap, struck down by a flailing arm from the sky? I kneel down anyway, to touch their pulse.

I stand up. This person isn’t breathing, and dark blood flows from a dent in the side of their skull. This person isn’t alive.

I stare at the arm. Its presence is disquieting enough, but for it to seem somehow familiar, as well? Vertigo shifts my world from one side to the other as I pick up the arm, gingerly, by its elbow. It’s heavier than I thought it would be.

The sirens are multiplying, as if a swarm is about to descend all at once. I back away from the corpse and feel something squish unpleasantly beneath the sole of my sneaker. I lift my foot to see jellied strings connecting it to the sidewalk: another eyeball. Swift remorse jolts through me, immediately followed by revulsion, as though I’ve stepped on a cat’s tail.

I run back into the apartment building and slam the door behind me. My heart is thudding. I’m covered in a sheen of sweat.

And I’m still holding the severed arm.

Your arm.

Standing there in the stuffy dimness, I can barely breathe. I shift the arm around me, grappling with it like an unwieldy rifle. I press its still-warm palm to my own. I interlace what fingers it has left with mine, until we are holding hands, you and I.

It almost feels holy, in this sweaty cloister of an apartment foyer, leaning against the wall.

The stump, right where its index finger should have been (right where the shears lopped it off) twitches, and I scream, hurling the arm away from me. It lands on the carpet with an awkward thud. For long moments, I watch it, daring it to move, to come to life and start crawling towards me, dragging itself along the floor by its bloody fingertips.

It does no such thing. It doesn’t move at all.

In fact, it looks lonely.

---

Your finger is crooked even further now, I swear it. Perhaps it’s the slow degradation of the flesh in the strong water; the muscle inside your finger is contracting slowly, or something. I’m sure there’s some kind of explanation for it, but I can’t come up with one. It’s been approximately thirty minutes since the police have arrived on the scene, and nobody knows what to do with all the fallen flesh, with all the carnage that’s been wrought. The whole neighborhood’s been cordoned off.

No one knows what’s happened. Reports are trickling in on my phone. They’re analyzing the flight paths of airplanes that might’ve traveled overhead, that might’ve loosed some cargo, or something. They’re looking for anomalous weather conditions that might’ve disturbed a cemetery somewhere, and brought the limbs to fall upon us like some kind of Biblical plague.

Night’s about to fall, and I have no power in the apartment. No lights. The entire neighborhood is without power, and there’s a stuffed quiet, as if someone has taxidermied the whole block.

Nobody knows which department is in charge of what. I’ve seen trucks roll through marked DEPT OF SANITATION, and I’ve seen men in HAZMAT suits, and the police have been going door to door. They even rang my doorbell, but I didn’t answer. Pretended I wasn’t home.

In the dark, I sit here fingering your suicide note. The one that’s creased and folded around the edges, from where I keep it in my wallet. The one that’s stained with my tears. The one that begins Dear Noah. I’m sorry.

I’m so angry that I crumple the note up in my fist, then smooth it out again, like I have a hundred times before, and try to read it further, even when I know it now by heart.

 

I hope you understand, someday.

This is the only way I know how to escape.

I long to be free of my body.

But I will miss yours.

 

Love, always—

Adam.

 

Lightning sighs voicelessly across the sky. I strip off my t-shirt, which is stained with your blood, and lunge at the jar in which your finger is kept. The water sloshes uneasily as I grip the top and unscrew. It takes some doing—I’d screwed it on tightly two months prior—but it finally pops free. There’s a sharp, acrid odor that rises out, and your finger is there too, pointing at me.

As if it knows what I’m going to do.

---

Hours pass, and they still haven’t cleaned up the street. Men in uniforms and hard hats stand outside, bickering with one another. One man points to another man, who points to another man. Most of them stand around smoking cigarettes, gawking at the ruin. Body parts still festoon the scene, some of them incongruously positioned in trees, or hanging from fire escapes. An arm is still laying, discarded, on the sidewalk, and it’s this that I crouch by as I furtively unveil my secret. I’ve wrapped it in paper towels, patted it dry of the strong water. It’s got such a strange, gummy texture to it, and it’s so cold when I pull it out of its little shroud.

When I place it on the stump of the arm’s missing finger, I feel a jolt. A spark.

And when I blink, there’s your arm, made whole again, up to the shoulder.

At once, I understand everything.

I turn my eyes up to the sky in a sort of supplication. I wonder: will there be more of you, like this? Can I find all of your disparate parts? Can I somehow…undo what you’ve done, through puzzling you back together?

There: an ear, nestled in the leaves of the neighbor’s holly bush.

There: a finger. So many superfluous parts. Are they all you? I only need nine more fingers to make ten. Ten toes. Two feet. Two hands.

Teeth. So many teeth, littered around like tiny pebbles. I count them out as I collect them from the ground. From a neighbor’s bird-bath, where they lay like innocents in the shallow puddle.

I go about gathering you up, piece by piece. On the second trip back to the apartment, I bring a backpack. Your backpack, the same one you wore when we climbed the mountain together. I put my hood up and wear sunglasses, though the sun is long since set. The sky is a haze of purplish blue, smeary with the aurora of streetlights. I do not stop when questioned. I run, stooping only to snare a gobbet of muscle that I need to restructure your cheek.

It’s like sculpture, I discover. Each piece fuses marvelously back into place.

The power has still not come back on. I work feverishly in the dark, while the hot, stinking wind blows in through the shattered windows.

I am possessed of the wildest, strangest hope.

Finally, I have all of you, your entire corpus, laid on the floor in front of me, right down to the ligature scars on your neck where the belt snapped your spine. You are complete, but without breath. Without life.

I prise open one of your eyelids with my index finger and thumb, and I breathe your name into the air. Lightning answers, illuminating the room in stark white for a half-second, and I swear I see your pupil dilate beneath the thin white clouds of death, departing.

I swear I see your lips tremble, start to move. Start to say my name.

“No…” Your voice is a harsh whisper, scratching against your throat. Your face starts to contort, your mouth opening in a wide howl, and I clamp my hand over it, to muffle your scream.

“It’s all right,” I reassure you. “You’re home now. And I’ll never let you go again.”

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Host Commentary

PseudoPod, Episode 915 for April 12th, 2024.

Heavy Rain, by TJ Price

Narrated by Scott Campbell; hosted by Kat Day audio by Chelsea Davis

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Hey everyone, hope you’re all doing okay. I’m Kat, Assistant Editor at PseudoPod, your host for this week, and I’m excited to tell you that for this week we have Heavy Rain, by TJ Price. This story originally appeared in the 2023 anthology Howls from the Wreckage.

Author bio:
TJ Price’s corporeal being is currently located in Raleigh, NC, with his handsome partner of many years, but his ghosts live in northeastern Connecticut, southern Maine, and north Brooklyn. He is the author of a novelette—The Disappearance of Tom Nero—and also has work in Nightmare Magazine, pidgeonholes, The NoSleep Podcast, as well as various anthologies. He can be invoked at either tjpricewrites.com or via the blue bird @eerieyore. Failing that, one can make a circle of chalk on the floor, stand in the center, and burn a photograph of a loved one until all that remains is ashes. Then, listen for a murmuring from within the walls. Leave your message after the sound of the screb.

Narrator bio:
Scott Campbell searches for challenges that will increase his skills for the battles to come. The slush pile underneath PseudoPod Towers is a worthy opponent. Scott is an assistant editor at PseudoPod, and he lives in Florida with absolutely no pets. He writes, directs, and performs for the queer (in every sense of the word) cabaret The Mickee Faust Club. He also writes far too infrequently at the official online home of the Sleep Deprivation Institute (and pop culture website) Needcoffee.com.

Before we go any further, a content warning: this story discusses suicide, right from the beginning. If that’s hard for you, please skip this one. We’ll be back next week.

And now we have a story for you, and we promise you, it’s true.

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Well done, you’ve survived another story. What did you think of Heavy Rain by TJ Price? If you’re a Patreon subscriber, we encourage you to pop over to our Discord channel and tell us.

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Grief… is a strange, shape-shifter of a thing. As you grow older, you think you understand it… that you know how it will hit you. That first you’ll go through A, then B, then C. And then you lose someone else – because, tragically, the longer you live, the more that happens – and you find it’s completely different. You’re angry in a way you never were before. The pain burns in a way it never did before. The scars ache in a way they never have before. You are changed. And no matter how much you wish for it, you cannot go back. You can’t erase it. You can’t make it stop.

TJ Price captures that here. It’s never spoken explicitly, but it’s clear to me that our main character blames himself for his partner’s death. He’s telling this story and he is not the hero, not even a little, and to me, that speaks many, many volumes in three-and-a-half thousand words. Noah is angry. And he is full of shame.

These lines…

Since you took my heart and then fled to a place where I could never get it back, I took the pruning shears from the shed in our apartment building’s little backyard, and I snipped off your left index finger.

Yes. He’s angry with himself, angry with Adam, angry with the world. He can’t scrub the stains from the floor, and he can’t make the scars disappear.

To quote from a book which undoubtedly inspired some of the ideas in this story, “Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.”

The last time I hosted, I said that the trouble with revenge was that we spend a great deal of time thinking about the moment of revenge, which is short, and not about what comes after, which is long.

Since I wrote, and recorded, those words I’ve continued to think about them. It’s not just revenge, is it? It’s a very human thing: to fix on a single point in the future. We’ll go on that date. We’ll sit this exam. We’ll move house. We’ll get married. We’ll live happily ever after.

We plan for the event, which is short, and we don’t think about what comes afterwards. Which is long…

I feel that for Noah, here. He wants Adam back. He wants him back so badly it all but consumes him. In real life, of course, we keep letters, pictures, gifts. Here, because this is horror, Noah keeps a finger. But it’s all the same. Pieces we just can’t let go of.

And here when the heavy rain comes, Noah forces Adam back together. He doesn’t think about what Adam wants, or wanted. He doesn’t think about what will come after. He is fixated on the act of creation. There is no after.

Adam is home, and Noah will never let him go again. There is no after.

No happily ever after.

Brilliant, brutal, heart-shredding writing from TJ Price.

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Before I get on with the usual end bits: in the real world, there are always choices. Always. If any of the issues here affect you, please seek support. In the UK, you can contact The Samaritans, on 116 123, or by email, or even by written letter, if that might help. In America, you can call the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline on 988. Other countries have similar services. We’ll put some links in the show notes.

www.samaritans.org

988lifeline.org

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_suicide_crisis_lines

And now to the subject of subscribing and support, PseudoPod is funded by you, our listeners, and we’re now formally a non-profit. One-time donations are gratefully received and much appreciated, but what really makes a difference is subscribing. A $5 monthly donation on Patreon will go farther than you would believe. Subscribers give us way more than just money, they give us stability, reliability, and dependability. Monthly donations give PseudoPod a well-maintained tower from which to operate, and trust us, you don’t want breaches in our walls.

If you can, please go to pseudopod.org and sign up by clicking on “feed the pod”. If you have any questions about how to support EA and ways to give, please reach out to us at donations@escapeartists.net.

If you can’t afford to support us financially, and we understand, times are tight – then please consider leaving reviews of our episodes, or generally talking about them on whichever form of social media seems the least awful this week. By the way, we now have a Bluesky account: find us at @pseudopod.org. And if you like merch, Escape Artists also has a Voidmerch store with a huge range of fabulous hoodies, t-shirts and other goodies. The link is in various places, including our pinned tweet. Check it out!

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PseudoPod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. Download and listen to the episode on any device you like, but don’t change it or sell it. Theme music is by permission of Anders Manga.

Next week we have… Flash on the Borderlands LXX (70): Through a Glass Darkly with stories by Sam Lesek, Marjorie Bowen, Harriet Beecher Stowe and… er… Kat Day. Dunno who that is. Anyway.

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And finally, PseudoPod, and Mary Shelley, know….

“Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.”

See you soon, folks, take care, stay safe.