If Objects Could Speak: Stories From the Unseen Corners

Rain does not fall down. It gets driven sideways. That is the first thing you learn when somebody snaps your spine straight and hoists you up against the gray. Last episode we gave voice to an old porch chair that watched the road. Now, I know how that sounds. But hang on. A chair stays put on timber. I lived out on the switchback between a man's knuckles and the open sky. I was eight steel ribs and black oiled silk. A curved crook of ash wood for a grip. When the squalls blew off the ridges, colder than a creek bed in November, he reached for me.

He carried me tucked tight under his elbow like a folded paper. He gave me purpose. He would shove that brass collar up until my joints clicked into their iron notch, tight as a drum. People think protection is quiet work. It is violence. A million drops hammering fabric at forty miles an hour. Gale winds wrenching under the rim, trying to turn a fellow inside out. He leaned his shoulder into the storm, and I took the blow. I shielded his wool coat. Kept his glasses dry. For three years, we walked through the downpours like that. He trusted my tension.

I trusted his hand. He shook the river off me before we stepped across any threshold, careful as a brakeman checking an air hose. Then came a Tuesday in October. The clouds cleared out by noon. The sun broke through, sudden and fierce, turning the wet asphalt into hammered tin. He walked into a depot diner smelling of fried ham and steam heat. He hooked my crook over the brass footrail beneath his stool. My silk was still weeping onto the linoleum. He ate his eggs. He folded his paper. He laid two dollar bills beside his coffee mug.

Then he stood up and walked out into the dry air. He did not look back. He did not mean any harm by it. That is just the way of flesh and blood. You only remember the shelter while the water is pouring down your neck. The minute the sky turns blue, a shield just looks like an errand you have to carry. Other hands moved me. A girl with a mop shoved me into a tall tin can by the coat rack. I found company in there. A broken cane. A wool muffler gone gray at the fringe. Nobody came looking. Days stacked up like lumber. Dust settled deep into my creases where the rain used to pool.

Yesterday, another stranger pulled me out. An old woman with swollen fingers and no coat to speak of. The glass outside the door was trembling under an April cloudburst. She did not know whose crook she was holding. She didn't care about the notch worn into my ash handle. She simply shoved my collar upward until the iron clicked home. My ribs took the strain. My black silk flared open against the thunder. We stepped out together into the deluge. A coat gets kept. A ring gets passed down. But an umbrella belongs entirely to the weather.

We are not abandoned, friend. We are just waiting between the drops for the next set of wet hands. Well. That is about the size of it.