Cut

Genarro Rafael Pascual

Rain in midday summer and the grass blanched by the thick settling of fog. As if the skies, unable to piece a pattern of seasons, conjectured rain. Blood on the driveway, water spilling from the skies and purifying whatever remains may soon putrefy. The diluted substance being sucked by the hungry earth, as they were carried away from the streets. If you would let your eyes linger towards the source you’d see bloody skin and skewered bone, flailed flesh and muscle beyond repair. And the blood coming from tattered veins, drained from the microscopic canals of an eye tombstone-still, despite itself. Then turn back time a little, bone, flesh, vein, muscle, skin and spilled organs all a-tatter, slowly forming into something familiar, the clothes she wore sewing itself anew. The car lights, a pair of orbs all blinding wrath of churning electricity, about to seep back into the fog. The girl, barely eighteen, waiting for a lover under the rain. Wheels screaming with as much pitch as their throat-lacking selves can throw. The man on the wheel, the look in his eye, the umbrella at the back of his car even though he was sure it wouldn’t rain. The girl was not alone, the first of a thousand bullets barely touching her skull –

Suddenly, the movie crashes, and you play it again; and in this scene you see the car skidding to a stop, smoothly as it should be. The boy stepping down, with his clichéd smile, and the scene that follows which you’re entirely familiar with. It was summer, truly summer. The golden eye of the sun bared the world and all its colors in the limelight. The hug, the kiss, the zooming at the faces and the lips, as if it was all that matters. All was according to script with nothing left out, and the cameras roll, and you doze off. The movie will end sometime but the last thing you saw was the kiss, and the fields beyond blazing abloom.

When you wake up, it’s summer, and it’s raining. You think of how the weather evades prediction. How nothing is certain, how you’re never secure.