Autumn Without Rain by Lucy Zhang
1400 words, 7 minutes reading time
Issue 2 (Spring/Summer 2023)
When Father is sad, he summons rain and floods the land: streets transform into rivers, the power goes out, and I stay indoors, hoping the clouds will part. It’s only when he drowns the crops of long beans and snow peas do I know he’s upset. His expression never changes—the same stoic look, furrowed eyebrows, pursed lips, curt tone, efficient speech. Before the White Dragon stole Mother away, he would only rain every few weeks, and even when it fell, Mother could summon the wind to disperse the rain clouds and distribute the water—it never poured, only drizzled.
It has been raining for the last few weeks and the only time I venture out is to restock the fridge with cabbages, which last a long time and minimize my trips. I tug on rain boots that end at my thigh and wrap myself under a poncho. I never bother with an umbrella because those flimsy things can’t hold under my father’s downpour—they only create another dripping mess to hang dry once I return home.
We’re low on vegetables and eggs so I grab a plastic grocery bag and head out. Even though it’s morning, the clouds suffocate the sun and the asphalt roads look more black than gray while soaking wet. The street lamps stand like pillars, all of them dim because of the power outage. No one walks here alone if they can help it. Most folks leave in scheduled groups so they’ll have enough eyes to keep watch for deep puddles and sinkholes the increasingly aggressive rivers have caved in. I can summon fireflies to help guide my way, a most useless summoning—no stars or sun or moon, only fireflies whose tiny buds of light barely illuminate their surroundings, barely enough to know they exist. In big clusters, the fireflies reveal a single person’s path and no more.
I buy as many cabbages as the bag can hold. The rain falls like bullets down to earth. Autumn has just ended and the White Dragon still did not return Mother this year, instead leaving us with a chest of gold from his treasures as payment. Father pretends it doesn’t exist, so the chest sits in the house like a stone too large to move, too ugly to touch.
At home, Father sits by the kitchen window, holding a mug of green tea against his large, knobby knuckles. I once asked him to stop the rain, and it only rained harder the next day.
“People think they are so smart, with these dams and all,” he laughs. “I am going to crush those dams.”
But Father can’t really do so. He’s weaker as a human, only capable of summoning the rain in local regions. The dams are nowhere near our home, especially not the big ones generating huge amounts of hydropower. He’d need Mother to help guide the precipitation there.
“When do you think we’ll be able to use electricity again?” I ask. I’m thinking of the gas and electricity companies, their repairs and slow customer response, but Father thinks I’m accusing him.
“What do you need electricity for? Your mother and I lived without it for millennia. I don’t see people surviving without water for millennia.” Father glares at me. I feel stupid for asking. “The world could use a good washing,” he continues.
Winter arrives and the soaked grounds freeze to ice and the water droplets from the sky solidify into sharp crystals. It is a white, sharp, jagged winter without Mother. Father spends his days sitting by the window speaking about the “lost” days, when he and Mother could carve riverbeds out with his tail, when folks would burn incense in extravagant pagodas for him to favor their crops and he’d float through the sky, high on the smell. And now look, in his human form all he can do is soak our heads and our neighbors’ heads. “Stuck in this pathetic, two-legged body,” Father grumbles.
Father is not truly stuck. Mother and Father birthed me as a human and they decided to maintain their form to raise me. He can return to the skies should he wish, although I’d be left behind to tend the house, answer to nagging neighbors about crooked fence panels, and brew too much tea for one person. The White Dragon stole Mother to the skies under the guise that it needed her strength to shake the leaves down and strip trees bare for winter. “That fool is only now realizing gold and iron can’t solve all problems,” Father curses. “Always taking, never giving. When we were growing up, we never took from others. We solved our own problems, built our own solutions, overcame hardships with no help or anything. We ate our bitterness like hummingbirds eat nectar.” Father curses the White Dragon every few days—the same complaint, different comparisons. Sometimes it’s hummingbirds eating nectar, other times it’s cranes plucking fish, and still other times it’s pythons swallowing eggs.
“The White Dragon is very weak, very pathetic,” Father says. “But once your Mother is in the skies, we can only wait.”
“You could return to Mother,” I suggest quietly, hoping my voice will blend into the background even though I know Father can hear the slightest of sounds.
Father narrows his eyes at me and returns to looking through the window, at the swampy backyard, the wilted plants, and the decorative stones that have been shaken loose from the earth. “You can’t take care of yourself.”
We have one chance to be human.
Father told me it’s because centuries ago, the Yellow Emperor stole a dragon from its nest—one who cried tears of jade as a dragon and tears of pearl as a human—a dangerous thing to be, this summoner of prosperity. The Yellow Emperor locked the creature up and starved it into compliance, forcing one transformation to the other, filling storage houses full of jade and pearls. Until the creature no longer remembered the original feeling of its legs and wings, its body warped into a form with tablecloth-like wings and a scaly human face that could no longer cry. After that, dragons were stripped of their ability to turn human more than once. After you returned to the skies, you couldn’t come back. “Once is enough to know if you’re ok like this forever,” Father would say when a younger me complained about the unfairness of such rules. I don’t have a dragon form though. Father claimed it was because I was conceived at a time when smog started covering the sky, and it has only gotten worse since.
“I’m fine on my own,” I try to convince Father.
“You should plant some more trees. Their roots will keep the soil from slipping and sliding. Kids these days fall too much. Is it something with this generation? Fools who can’t keep their eyes straight? Are their brains full of air?”
“I will when it stops raining,” I promise.
“They should be trees that’ll last the end of time.”
I’m not sure there is such a thing. I could stick a few tree cuttings into the ground, and as long as they outlasted us, I don’t think Father would notice. Humans don’t stick around long, certainly not longer than trees. He hasn’t recalibrated his notion of time with human life expectancies. I stare outside. No tree cutting would last the night in this storm.
I ask the fireflies to hover around the table as night falls and what was once gray now blackens. I can make out the lines on Father’s knuckles, the flexion creases on his palms, and the calluses that protrude like smooth pebbles from his fingers. Father tended the garden quite a bit when Mother was around. They enjoyed the harvest, constantly delighted by how a bit of water and sun yielded something as sweet as a fig. I thought it got old fast, and no one could eat so many figs without getting a stomach ache anyway. Mother lectured me for not appreciating the marvels of life. Father backed her up with grunts of agreement.
I silently pray to Mother to blow the precipitation elsewhere, at least for a day.
“You can plant them next autumn, when your mother returns,” Father continues as he peers into the sky.
He should know Mother can’t survive the skies as a human. I imagine her soaring above the clouds, sleek and agile like a ribbon gliding in the air. By next autumn, this group of fireflies will be dead and a new batch will guide me through the murk. I anticipate another downpour.