Story behind a story: “And the Raindrops—Its Tears”
When I promised myself to be more active with my blog, one thing I wanted to talk about was the origins and backgrounds of some of the stories I’ve published. Mainly because that’s something that I always like hearing about from other writers. So let me start at the beginning.
“And the Raindrops—Its Tears” is, I think, my first published story, and also the first story I ever got accepted on the first try. That’s pretty rare for me, apart from stories written because of an invitation. Most of my short stories averaged around 15 rejections before finding a home. One story, “Ghost Written,” received around 70 rejections over the course of 3 years before it got picked up. What can I say, people say no to me a lot. You shrug these off, have a good cry, rail at the unfairness of it all—and look for the next place to submit it. Based on the number of times I’ve given it “the old college try,” I’d say I’ve symbolically earned at least 4 PhDs.
“And the Raindrops—Its Tears” remains one of my most unusual stories in some ways. It’s about as close as I’ll ever come to anything approaching “cosmic horror,” a genre that tends to leave me pretty cold. It was written in 2008 and was inspired in part by a walk I took around midnight on a gusty night. I was feeling alone and lonesome, couldn’t stand another second in my apartment, and just wanted to be outside, listening to some music that fit my mood. As I recall, I was listening to Adore by The Smashing Pumpkins.
There was a single, sinister cloud in the sky, hanging out near a very bright moon. Clouds in Colorado always seem so much closer than I remembered in my KY childhood (and since Denver is the Mile High City, I presume clouds are indeed quite a bit closer than the sea level elevation of My Old Kentucky Home). Anyway, I was freaked out about the cloud and just didn’t want to even look at it as I made my solitary way. But it triggered a memory I had of a summer after high school, when I was sitting with a friend on the hood of his car, talking and looking up at the night sky. I was very much in love with my friend, and not yet out to anyone. He was talking about problems with his girlfriend and I dutifully listened and sympathized, all the while thinking how much better off he’d be if he were with a guy like—well, like me.
My friend was very Catholic, and while we sat talking and staring up at the moon, a cloud was moving past, and I suppose it had the vague suggestion of a pair of eyes. As the cloud moved overhead, one of the eye openings aligned with the moon, and my friend suddenly said, “I see the Lord’s face!”
I could sort of see it myself, a cloudy Shroud of Turin visage with the moon beaming through the right eye socket. Years later, as I walked alone under a different cloud in a different state but wrestling with the same loneliness, the memory came back to me. I see the Lord’s face. And I started thinking about a world dominated by this cloud that you don’t dare look up at without the risk of going mad. I started thinking how society might change under that reality, and envisioned people walking around with open umbrellas slung low over their heads to make sure they never get an accidental glance at the sky. I imagined a whole religion springing up around this strange cloud. The phrase “and the raindrops—its tears” quite literally sprang to mind seemingly from out of nowhere.
It was all so weird and captivating, and I turned around and went back to my apartment, my loneliness replaced with an enthusiasm to tell a story that I wanted to be more about style and artifice than character. I wanted everything to feel distant and cold. Again, not at all how I normally go about storytelling. The protagonist is nameless; the other principle character’s name is uncertain, and the two possible pronunciations of that name are meant to be obviously symbolic: Be True or Betray. It’s an icy narrative.
The manuscript was submitted to a zine called Reflection’s Edge. I really can’t remember why I singled them out. Duotrope was the big submission database for writers at the time, and that’s where I would have encountered it as a possible opportunity. The publisher liked it and a month or two later I got a check in the mail for $80. I can’t say for sure how many people read the story; probably not very many. The story was reprinted in my collection Seventeen Stitches, which is out of print at the moment but I think there’ll be a new edition of it coming out in a year or so.
I used most of that check to pay my electric bill, thereby fulfilling Stephen King’s definition of talent.
