39
By Victoria Davison Feistner


I'm writing this by the window. Every so often, through the rain
trails thick on the corporate glass, I fancy that I see a light. A
light parallel to me, or from above—-of course not from below.
They say—-or perhaps I merely read it somewhere—-that a person must
do something twenty-nine times for it to become a habit. If that's the
case then the sound of rain to me--on glass, on the roof, once on
trees and on my skin--is a habit: something I will never be fully free
of, a response always lingering, even if never fufilled.
A bank of lights! The building opposite, slightly higher, 8th floor
perhaps? Oh, now it's gone again; all I see is my own lamp, reflecting
in those tiny glittering trails.
Twenty-nine. Why twenty-nine? Why not just thirty? Perhaps thirty is
too round, too unscientific. Still, I wonder how they reach that
number. Scientifically.
Scientifically, thanks to a calendar next to my purloined desk, I
know that it should be a waning quarter moon tonight. I have no way to
verify this; no one, after all, has seen the moon for weeks.
I watch one droplet trace its way, wending down the window, colliding
and dragging others down with it. It's hypnotic and hateful.
The smell of this Sharpie is giving me a headache behind my eyes.
Will anyone care to read that? I care to write it, and so it is my
choice. I filled the other pieces of cracked plastic—-no longer useful
in repairs—-that Christy found with our official story, our collected
memoirs, our hopes and goodbyes. I wrote for hours. 3 Sharpies later,
one small piece was left and I am being selfish. I want some truthful
part of me to remain behind, unedited, not to be dredged up only to
reveal half-omissions and statistics.
The lamp hesitates, crackling; it flickers. Perhaps the battery is
going, or the wiring. Then I will be left in this blue-gray dark, with
only myself fragmented in the droplets.
There was a time before the rain. There was sun, and sky, and stars,
and ground. There was an earth.
When the light goes I'll join the others upstairs, closer to the
roof, better to hear the helicopters that John says are coming. We
must only believe in them. I only believe in being close to the
generators, a grinding, smoky noise that means I will no longer hear
the plinks and the drips, although my ears will remember. My eardrums
will have ghostly reverberations.
Twenty-nine times to form a habit. More than enough days and nights
of constant, never-relenting rain. We are on thirty-nine nights now,
as I see the lights in the distance flicker into life once more. I
should tell the others.
Thirty-nine. It is almost a round number.


- - -
Victoria Davison Feistner is a writer, a graphic designer and an
artisan, in equal parts, although some parts are more equal than
others. She resides in Toronto.