Penelle Magazine

The people of the village needed ample oil for the festival. The paper lanterns needed lighting, and they needed to stay lit through the month. The sturdy, slick paper had been cut into all manner of shapes—birds, flowers, fruits, fish—and came in all manner of hues—vermillion, dandelion, cyan, crimson, tangerine—and they would lend the town a happy glow in spite of the eternal rain.

No one knew when the rain had started—all elders who might have known had passed by this time—and many theorized it hadn’t started at all. It had just always been. Still, even the theorists wondered about so-called sunshine referred to in mildew-muddled scrolls. The consensus was that it was no use lamenting their damp conditions. Instead, they would build their homes under cover of the cliffs and trees, dig troughs that turned river floods into irrigation, and they would hang paper lanterns slicked for water resistance and keep them lit for one month a year to celebrate the light they did have, the warmth they could create.

There would be singing during the festival, too, and dancing and instruments. They would let their footfalls drown out the steady beat of rain, drummers would drum freely and out of sync out of spite for the rain’s constancy. They would warble and croon and chant and wail, and they would not be drowned out by the rain.

The festival, of course, would not be complete without costumes. All would don the brightest fabrics they owned, weave iridescent ribbons into their hair and tie them round their wrists and ankles. They would paint the glittering dust from the cliffs onto their faces and bodies and let the lantern light bedazzle them. Dancing, they’d slice through the rain, they’d show they were not afraid.

The joyous month passed with much laughter and kissing. On the final day, for it seemed indecent to keep away from work and daily life for so long, the villagers bestowed upon each other sad smiles as they took down the lanterns, rubbed off the glitter, let the last of their celebratory lights go out. Not a few little children cried, not understanding, at the disappearance of their pretty ribbons and the colorful glow the lanterns had cast along the streets. When their parents explained, tucking them into bed, they wept for the darkness they would awaken to in the morning.

And then they awoke to light.

The first villager awake, a tumbling little girl, retreated under her bedclothes to shield her eyes from the light. It was thousands of times brighter than the festival lanterns. Slowly, she slipped out of bed bit by bit, letting the light touch her hands, her arms, then her face and legs. There were no window coverings to draw aside, for there had never been any light to keep outside the house.

The little girl stood silently in the square of light that had situated itself on her bedroom floor. As if drawn by strings in her surprise, she toddled to her parents’ bedroom and woke them. They, too, shuddered when they first opened their eyes, and slowly made their way out from under the covers. The girl’s mother grabbed her close, as if the light might harm her. For the first time since his mother’s passing, the girl’s father wept.

Soon, the streets were flooded with people. Some silently watched the light glance off of the raindrops on the leaves and on the grass. Some groaned and held their faces after trying to stare at the light’s source—the sun. Others could barely see the light, could only feel its warmth tickling their skin, for their tears overwhelmed them and made the whole world watery again.

Under the sunshine, every inch of the village came to life. Beneath the villagers’ feet, the ground grew dry and warm. Like lizards, they lay on the sun-baked dirt and stones, and felt the sun’s caress. They pressed their faces to dry tree trunks and hung all their clothes outside, hoping the sunlight would imbue the fabric with eternal warmth. Lovers marveled at the new ways they could look into each other’s eyes, illuminated by the sun. Parents clapped their hands with joy to see real rosiness in their children’s cheeks. Elders blessed the soil, grateful that their future burial grounds would be ones touched by such brilliant light.

Slowly, the villagers ventured farther and farther from the cliffs that had concealed their livelihoods. They were delighted to find a field full of flowers so bright and beautiful that their flower-shaped festival lanterns might as well have been mud. Like the villagers, the flowers seemed to stretch themselves out under the sun, hungry from its honey-colored warmth.

One young man ventured around the side of the cliff, away from the rest of his people, and peered out into the distance. The view brought him to his knees, and his throat produced a joyous, strangled cry. When the villagers rushed to meet him, fearing he’d been hurt, they, too, fell to their knees. The colors of the flowers seemed to have bled into the very sky. An arc of red, yellow, violet, every hue, stretched over the fields and disappeared behind a distant hill.

A young woman sobbed. “But what have we done? What have we done to deserve this beauty?”

Her father bent to console her. “We have endured. Our people have endured the gray and the black for centuries, and so Nature has decided to show us mercy on the day after our festival’s end. We have pleased her by showing such courage.”

This elicited many murmurs, some in agreement and others more skeptical. “Perhaps,” began an elder, trying to straighten his bent back to get the others’ attention, “it is Nature’s parting gift. Perhaps this is the end of our people.”

A silence fell over the villagers. No one had wanted to admit it, but all the while they had been soaking up the sun and laughing and embracing each other, they had feared this was only a small reprieve before the unrelenting deluge that was to come the next day.

“Regardless,” the old man’s wife spoke up, “we ought to enjoy today as much as we can. Nothing lasts—not even the rain, as we now know.”

The villagers nodded and murmured their agreement, then went back to taking in the illuminated world’s beauty, if a little more uneasily than before. That evening, the villagers sat out in the field and watched the sunset, weeping from the deep oranges and soft pinks that graced the skies and from grief. Some families, as soon as the sun had started to go down, had taken it upon themselves to create a sort of gravestone in the field for the sun, certain they would never see it again.

Despite the sun’s disappearance, the villagers did not go inside. It was nighttime, but the sky was still clear and there appeared to be thousands, millions of miniature suns stippling the darkness. Children lay on their backs in the grass and pointed out the shapes—bears, lions, fish—that could be formed with the tiny suns. It seemed as if they could make the night last forever if only they kept finding pictures in the sky.

After a while, parents began scooping their sleeping children out of the grass and carrying them home. The elders, for all their fighting, began to fall asleep on the shoulders of their children and were forced to use the last of their wakefulness to retreat to the village. The villagers’ droopy eyes closed over the clear skies the way the gray clouds would come morning, if not earlier than that. Only one villager stayed behind.

He had no children to tuck in, no spouse to kiss before bed, so he stayed out in the field all night, watching the horizon for the first signs of the rain’s return. He didn’t sleep a wink—his red eyes confirmed that much—and yet he saw no clouds. The man closed his eyes, counted to twenty, then opened them again, and there were no clouds. Only the sun rising to lighten the world once again.

The sun and stars and moon rose and set without issue for months and months. Slowly, the villagers stopped watching the sky with fear, stopped counting constellations with the same desperation they’d use to consume their last meals. They went to bed when they were sleepy, they rose from bed when they were not. They went back to their usual routines, now enhanced by their view of the sky. From seeing the moon, they learned their crops did best when planted under a sliver and harvested under a bulb. From seeing the stars, they began to venture farther
and farther from the village without getting lost.

A year passed, and the villagers realized there was no need for a festival. The sun and the wildflowers would put their lanterns and costumes to shame, anyways, and so the lanterns and costumes were left inside to collect dust.

The prolonged lack of rain presented some problems, at first. The irrigation systems went dry, and for a while some of the paler villagers walked around red-faced, their skin not accustomed to needing sun protection. But the sun was never sweltering, and the land was never in drought. The villagers began to fetch water from the caves where they used to gather glitter for the festival to water their crops, and eventually dug a path for the groundwater to flow into the fields. In the flower fields, the sunburnt villagers found leaves that could be crushed into a salve
that would relieve them until their skin darkened.

Just as the rain had become a way of life, so did the sun. No one tried to stare straight at it anymore, and the sunsets, while still beautiful, did not bring the whole of the village to their knees. The elders who’d channeled the rain for all their fables and blessings passed on. For years, babies were born who’d never seen a gray sky.

And then the downpour returned.

A little girl who’d been born after the sun woke up wailing, terrified of what seemed to be a monster beating on the roof and on the windows of her bedroom. Her parents rushed to her, then paused. The house was chilly, and the rising sun had left no squares of light on the bedroom floor. The rain was back.

Afraid and willing the weather to be a dream, the villagers stayed inside all day. They refused to light lanterns in the middle of the day because they shouldn’t need to. The sun should be bright enough. Those brave enough to draw back their curtains—another creation that hadn’t come until the sun—watched the rainwater drown their crops and wash away the chairs they’d set outside for sunbathing. They cried, and cursed themselves for bringing the rain inside through their tears.

At the end of the day, the villagers slinked into their beds like sorry animals. Some whispered to the sky for mercy, others fixed the image of the sun in their minds before sleeping, hoping it would manifest into the real world. When they awoke, they awoke to more gray skies. Children beat their little fists on the damp walls of their houses, and lovers lamented the lost rosiness in each other’s faces. The remaining elders prayed, but having forgotten the precautions needed to protect their health from the cold rain, they passed on quickly.

What must have been weeks or months—it was hard to understand the time precisely without the sun—passed in this way, and the rain showed no signs of stopping. Those who’d taken the emergence of the sun as a sign of the end times weren’t satisfied. The supposed end times were the same as the beginning.

One day, the young man who’d been the first to see the rainbow in the field began to rifle through his cellar. When his wife asked him what he was doing, he didn’t respond. After much digging through old supplies and items that now needed to be stowed away because of the rain, he rose from the cellar with the family’s festival lanterns. When his wife saw them, her heart caught in her throat, and she shook her head.

“But the village has needed warmth for a long time now,” the man pleaded. “We used to get it from the festival, so we can do it again.”

His wife opened her mouth to speak, then shut it again. The man decided to take it as approval, but he knew what she was thinking. They couldn’t get warmth from the festival. Not after the warmth of the sun.

Despite this, the young man hung his lanterns on the house, smoothing out the wrinkles and bends that had come with their disuse. The rain washed the dust away. When he was finished, he stood back to admire his work. To his surprise and delight, he did feel a bit of warmth bloom in his cheeks at the sight of the violet fish and crimson flowers. Emboldened, he went inside to fetch something to light them with. They wouldn’t be as bright as the sun, he admitted to himself, but that was alright. They were something.

He tried to get his wife to join him outside, to maybe even weave the festival ribbons into her plaits the way she used to, but she remained at the kitchen table, shaking her head. Her husband’s hopefulness had attracted her before the sun had come and gone, but now it felt like gross naïveté. The young man shrugged off her repeated disapproval and began to light the lanterns, festival ribbons dangling from his wrist and ankles—he hadn’t been able to find his old costume, but he was sure it was around the house somewhere.

As he finished lighting the final lantern, the young man felt a sharp pain in his right shoulder. Something had hit it. He spun around, only to receive another small stone square in the forehead. His neighbors, seeing his lanterns from their window, had grown angry. Clutching his forehead and trying to keep the fear out of his voice, the young man offered to help them hang up their own lanterns. He was met with more stones.

Soon, more of the villagers emerged from their houses to see what the commotion was about. Sickened by the sight of the festival lanterns, those pathetic lights that had once been so beautiful in the time of ignorance, they began to search the ground for stones to throw, too.

Dazed by the impact of the stones and by his own helplessness to please his friends and family, the young man could only lean against the wall of his house and cower at the base of it. The villagers drew closer to him, trapped him, and began to claw at him, strike him, tear the festival ribbons from his arms and legs, strip him of the insolence that made him think anything could replace what they’d just lost. They killed him and went back inside. His wife watched from the window. There was no reason to do anything with the body. The ground was too wet for a burial, and no one went out in the streets anymore, anyways.

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Cadence Hodge (she/her) is a fiction writer and poet looking to connect with others through stories about art, mythology, nature, and love. She has had four short stories published: “Candle Making” and “The Mother” in Filament Literary Magazine and “The Bus Comes Before Long” and “Botticelli’s Venus, Trapped in Her Shell” in Threshold. Her poem “Ode to the Marilyn Monroe Rug on the Side of the Road” was published in Autumn Sky Poetry.