---

And in Rain, Blank Pages

by Lora Gray

 

It’s 1981, I’m nineteen and now I know the truth.

It rains in New York just like it rains in Indiana.

I’m wretched as a wet kitten and drunk, trudging through Brooklyn in a cardigan and combat boots. My lip is split. My left eye is beginning to swell.

I’m not even sure I know how to write poetry anymore.

Funny that I grabbed the notebook Tony gave me before running from his apartment, as if the potential of those blank pages was somehow more vital than an umbrella. A jacket. Fucking socks.

By the time I find an open diner, my feet are soaked and I’m shivering so hard it takes three tries to open the door. It looks empty and nobody greets me, but the stink of old grease presses over me like a damp palm. I sniffle, card my fingers through my hair, tacky with Aqua Net, and squelch my way to a booth.

My hands are vodka clumsy and cold as I take the notebook from my pocket and try to smooth the water-warped cover. I remember being sixteen, my head buzzing with new-to-me Plath and Wilde, daydreaming in couplets and free verse, an imaginary Kerouac beside me as I scribbled onto paper once reserved for geometry. Believing that, if I could just tap into the right words, real words, ones that lived and breathed, I would somehow better understand my loneliness and self-loathing when bullies shouted “fag” at me from across the school cafeteria.

For a while, here in New York, with Tony, I thought I’d finally made sense of it all.

A shadow falls over me and I stuff the notebook he gave me into my pocket. I look up. Long legs, a narrow hip cocked beneath a stained yellow apron, wire-rim glasses, feathered hair. A slow, disarming smile.

His name tag says “Felix” and he makes a show of straightening it. His hands are beautiful.

I fumble a “Hello” and then, “Um, I’d like a small coffee. Wait. Shit. I don’t know how much I have on me. How much is it?”

Felix doesn’t answer. He ticks his pen toward the order board instead (one dollar, thank God I have four quarters and a dime in my shoe), but I can practically see myself in the strain of his smile. What must he think I am? A punk? A kid hooking blow jobs for ten dollars a pop?

No wonder he doesn’t want to talk.

“I’ll have a small coffee, please,” I say, worrying my soggy sleeves over my hands as he disappears into the kitchen again.

Across the street, the downpour has reduced a strip joint to an impressionistic haze of legs and tits. A payphone slumps beside it. I could forgo the coffee, sacrifice a quarter. Call Tony. I imagine him, his hands fisted on his cab’s steering wheel, his broad back coiled like a half-thrown punch. The silence on the ride to his apartment, like a teakettle preparing to scream.

A coffee mug plunks onto the table.

I startle, smack the mug, and nonono, it tips, scalds my hand, splashes over the table, onto my sleeve, onto Felix. He catches the mug mid-topple and, nonplussed, begins mopping the coffee with a dish towel.

“I’m sorry!” I suck my burned fingers into my mouth, frantically try to help with a fistful of napkins. “I’m so sorry.”

Felix pauses and ticks his gaze carefully over me, before fishing a pen and paper from his pocket. It’s okay, he writes. Coffee looks good on you. Clean clothes are so 1979.

“You’re deaf?” I feel almost as awful for blurting it out as I do for spilling the coffee and shame slams into me so hard, I feel dizzy.

Felix’s expression softens, though, and he reaches out as if to touch my arm before laying his hand flat on the table. He spreads his fingers. Darkness swells beneath his touch before quivering and flowing outward. Narrow shapes scroll across the chipped Formica, winding toward me, winding. The shapes become letters. The letters become words.

I’m not deaf

I jerk backward, my gut swooping as I try to make sense of what I’m seeing.

Still touching the tabletop, Felix slides into the booth opposite me as if trying not to spook a stray cat and draws his collar aside with his free hand. A ragged scar puckers the hollow of his throat.

it’s aphonia I can hear you but I can’t speak

The words fade almost immediately. New ones hurry to replace them.

are you okay please don’t be afraid this is just so much easier than a pen and paper

and

I won’t blame you if you leave most people leave you just seemed different like maybe you’d understand my shift’s almost over please don’t leave the coffee’s on the house

and then

oh little dove where did you get those terrible bruises

---

In that empty diner, the blank notebook Tony gave me clutched to my chest, I burst like a cracked dam. I tell Felix everything. About Tony, the fight, how I lost my job last week, how I can’t go back to Indianapolis, to my parents and their “therapy.” How I have no place to go because nobody wants me, how even my poetry has abandoned me.

Felix listens as if every word is vital, every breath significant. I’m near hysterics and drunk, but he listens. I know I should be frightened of this strange, beautiful man and his intensity, the words flowing from his fingertips like ink, but Felix isn’t laughing at me. Even when I begin crying, he doesn’t call me “pussy” or “pansy.” He doesn’t threaten me or yell at me.

He only says you deserve better than that in delicate letters that caress the table between us like lace.

There is a needy hitch deep in my chest and when I close my eyes those words leave an afterimage, as if they want to sink into me. Maybe I want them to sink into me, to be those secret words I used to yearn for, the answers I never quite found.

When Felix offers me more coffee, a tentative smile, his jacket, a couch to sleep on for the night, I accept.

The caffeine is still struggling to cut through the last of the vodka as Felix walks me to his apartment. Shoulder to shoulder, our fingers not quite touching on his umbrella handle, I watch his words coil up the silver shaft. They glow, pale as moonlight, and sigh onto the nylon dome overhead.

isn’t the rain beautiful I love nights like this don’t you streetlights like stars on the asphalt the whole city a galaxy the whole universe splashing down to meet us oh watch out for that puddle that’s a good boy

The private theater of Felix’s thoughts occupies me so completely that he has to steer me around lamp-posts and street signs and he secures his arm around my waist so I don’t wander off the curb and into traffic. Through my cardigan, his hand is cool at the palm, warmer at the fingertips, as if those words heat his blood before pouring out.

a man can drown in three inches of water did you know that

you have to be careful around kiddie pools and garden hoses that’s why I never go swimming

Felix’s face is relaxed and distant, dappled with the transient letters above us.

“What about baths?” I ask, trying not to sound as awkward and drunk as I feel. “Don’t you ever take baths?”

baths are safe

His answer springs onto the umbrella so quickly, I laugh. “Why are baths safe?”

because I never bathe alone

Felix believes in social grooming, he says, in finger-combing a lover’s hair. He tells me about a childhood summer in Vermont and a broken robin’s egg, the baby bird still wet and knotted inside. First kisses with braces. Golden afternoons and the slow unravel of precious teenage regrets.

Tony never uses words like “precious.”

At his apartment, Felix gives me dry sweat pants and a T-shirt that smells like cigarettes and patchouli. He reheats fried rice on paper plates and hands me a Dixie cup of cheap merlot as we sit on the sofa.

quand le vin est tire il faut le boire, he says.

I laugh and shake my head. “I don’t speak French.”

Felix grins.

that’s a shame

I try to trace my finger over his words as they loop over the sofa, but they wisp away. What would it feel like for my thoughts to come to life so easily?

“None of this seems real,” I murmur, smiling and content, my belly pleasantly full. “Do you ever feel like you’re dreaming when you’re awake?”

is it a good dream

I take a slow sip of wine. “The nicest I’ve had in a long time.”

Felix rests his cheek on one fist.

you really aren’t afraid of me are you

“Should I be?”

His hesitation makes me sorry I asked, but Felix shifts, thoughts trickling over the cushion between us, slick as honey and so close I can almost feel the heat of each individual letter against my bare hand.

most people are afraid of me

I don’t think you’re most people

When Felix takes my empty cup and the paper plates to the kitchenette, I stroke the cushion where his words had been, as if I could somehow gather their warmth into my own body.

---

I dream of being thirteen, of waiting for my parents to fall asleep and locking my bedroom door. I wrap myself in a bedsheet ball gown and huddle beneath the altar of Rolling Stone centerfolds above my dresser, the tryptics of androgynous glam rockers, their blue eyeshadow, broad shoulders, conspicuous bulges, delicate cheekbones. I want them to take me away from this room, away from Indiana, to someplace I can be boy/girl/lovely without all the hatred and guilt. But when I open my mouth, my throat is tinder-dry and burning, like a chimney with a collapsed flue.

I wake gripping an unfamiliar pillow. My head is cottony, my tongue gritty, my neck kinked. A sofa spring pinches my hip and a far-off jackhammer pounds an uneven rhythm into my teeth. Groaning, I touch the black eye Tony gave me and sit up.

Felix is watching me from the bedroom door.

His nightshirt is half-unbuttoned and his hair sleep-tousled. Stretching, luxurious as a yawning cat, he slinks his hand onto the wall.

last night I dreamed of seahorses and the shape of the moon you’re beautiful I’m making breakfast

how do you like your eggs

I want, almost instinctively, to tug Felix’s hand from the cracked plaster and slide it against my skin. The urge is so intense I shake my head, overwhelmed and woozy, and stand so quickly the room spins.

“I should go.” I nearly trip over the hem of Felix’s borrowed sweat pants and I blush, grabbing my still-damp cardigan from where it’s draped over the radiator. “Thanks for letting me crash and for the clothes and food. Really. Thank you. I’ll pay you back. I just —”

Felix’s gaze lances into me and I freeze. Will he shove me? Pin me to the wall? Force me into that bedroom? I don’t really know him.

aren’t you hungry

I don’t know this man at all.

I was going to make you breakfast

What he’s saying seems perfectly reasonable and kind. I twist my cardigan in my hands. “I don’t want to impose —”

you can’t go back to him

The words burst over the wall, block-lettered and heavy. When Felix steps closer, his hand extended, I flinch, my cardigan between us like a shield, and he looks so suddenly stricken that I regret it.

I want you to feel safe

Felix doesn’t look angry, at least not angry at me. He looks wounded. He looks lonely.

I know what lonely feels like.

don’t leave

stay

---

We are sharing a cigarette on the fire escape when Felix finally tells me about his scar.

It’s been two weeks since he first made me breakfast, two weeks of careful conversations and coy smiles, flirting and borrowed clothes, two weeks of cozy dinners on the couch. I’m daydreaming, imagining what it would be like to abandon my permanent rumple of blankets for Felix’s bed, when he says,

you smoke like a songbird did you know that robins sing to mark their territory have you ever heard a robin after dark

I smile, watching Felix’s thoughts loop lazily over the rail. “I’m tone deaf.”

I’ve heard you sing in the shower

He nudges my dangling leg with his foot, but his eyes are distant and fixed on the skyline. He touches the uneven scar on his throat and takes a long, careful drag.

the man who did this to me had green eyes and a jesus beard have you ever seen a man with a beard like god

The words are as evenly spaced and precise as if he’d tapped them out on a typewriter. There were boys, older boys, he tells me, who chased him, herding him into a gully as they hurled chunks of coal and sod at him and called him “dick-licker.”

Felix pauses, his hand hovering above the fire escape’s railing as if uncertain he should continue.

“It’s okay,” I say, even though my insides are beginning to knot. “Go ahead. I’m listening.”

Those older boys caught him, Felix says. They punched him in the gut and put a boot to his temple, laughing at him as they stuffed fistfuls of dirt and rocks into his mouth. When he started choking, the stranger with the Jesus beard appeared, furiously, silently chasing the bullies away. And then no air no air no air. Felix clawing at his own clogged throat, the stranger holding him, tipping his head back with knobby hands, stroking his hair with a pained expression, piercing Felix’s throat with a penknife. Then a gargling sound. Shock, warm and stuffy. The wet peel of Felix’s own flesh parting around a plastic drinking straw. Oxygen bypassing his nose and mouth. Felix looking at the stranger, blue sky behind him. Felix opening his mouth soundlessly, and a sudden surge of heat, thoughts roiling until he couldn’t contain them, until they burst out of him.

Twilight settles over us, brittle and cold, and Felix runs his hand through his hair, as if trying to scrub the memory away. The cigarette has burned to ash in my fingers and Felix takes it from me gingerly, stubbing it out on the fire escape before flicking it into the alley below.

“I’m sorry that happened to you,” I whisper.

Felix smiles sadly and then, for the first time, he lays his hand on top of mine when he says,

it isn’t your fault

His words stroke the back of my hand, warm, silky, intimate. He leans close. He tightens his grip. He closes his eyes.

He kisses me.

I forget to breathe.

---

I’m not certain what will happen when I open the notebook Tony gave me; I haven’t touched it since that night at the diner. I hold it at arm’s length as I curl onto the sofa. I’m sure Felix would tell me not to open it, if he were here. It’s full of bad memories, he’d say. Bad energy. But Felix is at work, and there’s a quiver in my core urging me to write. To create.

I open the notebook and . . . it’s two months ago, my birthday, my first night away from home. Tony is beside me in bed, handing me a silver-wrapped gift, hovering close as I open it.

“It’s real leather,” he says, that tight smile that might mean teasing, might mean trouble later, pinching his eyes. “You’d better write something good in it.”

No.

No.

I imagine Felix’s hand over mine instead of Tony’s as I run my fingers down that first blank page.

Words tickle. Bubble. Grow. I touch pen to paper and I’m flooded with images, metaphors, similes; forgotten rhythms form in the deep parts of me, a breathless, careening tumble of ideas.

For the first time in what feels like forever, my poetry returns.

The weeks of hurt and fear, of wonder and the loveliness of Felix and his thoughts made physical, rush out of me. The city sighs through the apartment windows, light easing soft and golden down the alley. The traffic sings, melody shifting beneath my skin, the street thrumming five stories below, jackhammers and three a.m. traffic grinding a million bodies together, beautiful and dangerous, and my pen isn’t quick enough to catch every glorious tableau but I can’t stop because my heart, my hands, my lungs my fingers my thighs my cock are all throbbing, feeling for the first time in what seems like years and I’m falling surrendering I

am so engrossed that I don’t notice Felix standing there.

I snap the notebook closed, disoriented and flushed, guilt gripping me like a vise as if I’d been caught jacking off.

“I borrowed your pen.” I laugh to hide my nervousness and press my palm to the notebook as if I could make it disappear like a magician’s trick. “I hope you don’t mind. I felt inspired, I guess.”

Felix’s eyes are trained on me as he steps closer. He doesn’t touch the wall or the sofa. His hands are fisted at his sides and I can see a vein throbbing at his right temple. He smells like coffee and sweat. Wet pavement. He studies me as if he is only now seeing who I really am.

Slowly, he takes the notebook away from me.

I don’t know what to do. What to say. Where to put my hands. If this were Tony, I’d know to go into the other room, make him a drink, and turn on football to intercept the inevitable rage before I earned another bruise.

But this isn’t Tony.

Felix flips through the notebook, devouring words that feel too raw and private for anyone’s eyes but mine. What will he think of me now? What will he think of that heavy, syrupy flow of gibberish? I’m not even sure what exactly I wrote, only that I felt like I would incinerate if I didn’t let it out.

Felix lays a single fingertip on the arm of the couch.

I thought you said you didn’t write poetry anymore

I struggle to tamp down a flutter of panic. “I mean, I didn’t. The words wouldn’t come. Maybe it was just writer’s block. I don’t know. I shouldn’t have written in that notebook, I know, but I couldn’t find any other paper and—”

I thought you wanted to escape your past

I thought you were smarter than this

you don’t need him or anything that came from him don’t you know how much I care about you how much I’ve done for you

don’t you want to be with me

“Of course I want to be with you!” My pulse totters because, oh god, I can’t lose him. “It was stupid of me. It won’t happen again.” My palms feel clammy, my bones unsteady.

Felix sits beside me. I don’t deserve his gentle smile as he strokes the back of my hand.

why do you torture yourself like this little dove

He lays his free hand on the notebook and his thoughts pour out of both hands, covering me and the leather cover simultaneously. I imagine Felix’s words sinking through onto the pages, enveloping my poetry, transforming it into something more beautiful and true than I could ever create.

I have enough words for both of us

---

Felix sways against me, languid, his hair plastered to his forehead in sweaty ringlets as we dance. I’ve tried so hard to make him happy, to do what he says. I haven’t written anything in three days. I haven’t touched that notebook, even though he’s put it where I can see it, in his coat pocket.

a reminder he says of where you came from

Felix has traded shifts so he can always be there when I wake up, to cook for me, to be with me all day, to hold me close on street corners as the traffic passes. To protect me. To kiss me and love me.

To take me dancing.

The club is a chaos of cracked disco balls, cheap booze, and new wave music, bodies stiflingly close. The lights flicker, so dim I’m the only one who can see Felix’s thoughts as they jitter over my bare forearms and wrists.

you should see yourself

Felix trails a finger over my skin. He is three shots into a heavy buzz and grinning as he lifts my arm to follow the path of his words with his lips.

you’re gorgeous you should taste yourself

The space between us feels dangerously electric. “What do I taste like?”

home

august afternoons

He kisses me.

you know the smell of hot vinyl the kind that sucks your thighs to car seats have you ever been cut by a seatbelt I wish I’d known you before that car crash stole my voice before all that glass choked my words away

“What about the guy with the Jesus beard?” I tell myself Felix is just drunk. “I thought you said you lost your voice when those boys assaulted you.”

Felix slows. His hand tightens on my hip and he frowns, touching his own throat so the words dip into the scar.

I never said that

Felix drags his tongue over the curve of my jaw, mouth lingering against my stubble. It’s distracting, and my toes are curling but . . .

“But you said he gave you a tracheotomy. You said —”

Felix tenses against me. I shouldn’t have questioned him. I brace myself for the blow to finally fall, here in public, here where everybody will see. But there’s a sudden shift, another body pressing against me from behind, dancing. Felix’s palm blazes, the heat slicing through everything. He jerks me away from the stranger, his touch alive and burning until the other man gives up and dances away.

Then, in letters darker and bolder than any I’ve ever seen him use, Felix lays his hand on my arm and says

MINE

---

Sex is a language neither of us speaks fluently. Felix yanks his shirt up and off in a snarl of elbows and sweaty polyester. I fumble my belt and socks, topple sideways onto the unmade bed so hard the painting above teeters and threatens to fall.

My eyes are still open when Felix kisses me down to the mattress and words flash over the wall where he has braced his hand.

need you it’s been so long

need quivers and disappears before the others, as if Felix can’t quite hang on to the sear of it.

I try to tell myself I want it when Felix smothers me, chest to chest, friction, bare flesh and pleasure drilling deep, need need need on the headboard and my own skin. Hands grapple over my face as if searching for something to latch on to. I want to be good for him, even though I keep looking at that scar and wondering, was it a car accident? A tracheotomy? Was he really that drunk? Was he lying to me?

Felix’s fingers skim over my eyes, his thoughts sputtering like a broken film reel. I can’t decipher the words when they’re so close, but I can almost feel the valve of his thoughts open when he curls around me from behind, the swell of unbearable heat, letters stuttering across the sheets in waves.

yes like that with your tongue now use your teeth

Words flicker over the pillowcases.

your teeth have you ever seen a toddler’s skull all of those rows of unborn teeth no I didn’t mean that

Words tumble off the side of the bed.

let me in you can’t be like all the others let me in I don’t want to have to hurt you

Words blister my skin.

mine mine mine

Words crawl over me, layer upon layer of Felix’s thoughts tangling over themselves, devouring blank spaces, smearing my fingers black where I clutch the sheets, squirming into the corners of my eyes, my nose, my mouth.

There’s no air. No air.

My throat is full of ink. Glass. Stones. Jagged sod. Letters tear my gums and the edges of my tongue, snag my soft palate, puncture my throat as I swallow. I open my mouth to scream, but my voice is garbled. Boiling. Searing.

I heave.

MINE bursts from my lips.

With a snap of pain, I shove myself free and scuttle to the other end of the bed. Letters skitter away from me like cockroaches.

Everything tastes like blood and ink.

We stare at each other, naked and panting, the world between us wordless and taut. Felix raises his hand and no no no I jump off the bed before his thoughts have a chance to chase me across the disheveled sheets.

what are you doing

My throat burns as I scramble into my clothes. His clothes. This time I take his jacket. This time I remember some fucking socks.

you can’t go I need you you can’t go I need you you can’t go

I lurch against the wall, tears blurring everything, pain radiating from inside. Words dart across the apartment after me and I catch a glimpse of Felix clasping the bedroom doorframe, his face twisted as I fumble to unlock the front door.

I let you in

I let you see me

I let you in

The letters grow, towering on the living room walls, crackling over the plaster. They pulse all around me. Into me. Out of me. I snap the deadbolt open and dash through the narrow hallway, down the concrete stairwell.

I only wanted you to understand I only wanted you to feel the way I feel I only wanted you not again god oh god not again

I sprint down the steps, out and onto the sidewalk. Night air hits me, cold and damp. I trip. I find my feet. I run. Through the city, I run, the rush of Felix’s thoughts behind me like a fist about to fall, like a smack that hasn’t yet landed. I run through narrow, unfamiliar streets, across boulevards and alleys until the stitches in my side force me to cling to an unfamiliar lamp-post to catch my breath. I am leaning against the paint-flaked metal, panting and disoriented, when the notebook tumbles from Felix’s jacket pocket onto the concrete beside me. It lands, water-warped and crumpled. Half full. Half empty. For a long while, I look at it, the pages fluttering in the pale streetlight, before kneeling. I stroke those pages tenderly. It’s such a small thing. This “gift” I never asked for.

But it’s mine now, regardless. Mine to cherish. Mine to abandon.

My palm is warm when I press the leather cover closed. I stand and inhale deeply, thoughts quivering like stirred embers beneath my skin, words begging to ignite.

My words. Mine. Nobody else’s.

Rushing toward the surface as I walk away.

Refusing to cool as it begins to rain.

---

Host Commentary

…aaaaand welcome back. That was AND IN RAIN, BLANK PAGES by LORA GRAY, and if you enjoyed that, we’ve a couple more by them in the archives: from a couple years back, episode 677 was OUR ROOTS DEVOUR, and another two years before that was episode 556, SHADOW BOY. They both come with their own share of content warnings, but are just as powerful and poetic as this one.

Lora sent us these notes on today’s story: When I initially began drafting “And in Rain, Blank Pages,” I wanted to explore my own experience with aphonia, which happened several years ago following a throat surgery that damaged my vocal cords. But when the character Felix entered the mix, the story rapidly took an unexpected, and much darker, turn.

Thank you, Lora, for those thoughts and the story. I think this is one of those instances where I can serve the story best by not diluting it with my own thoughts: I first read it months ago, and in all that time it hasn’t lost any of its power or its beauty for me. It is elegant, dark, poetic, complex; it shows us comfort in love and violence in love, both in different ways. It does not pose easy questions about love, nor give easy answers. It is a story about the ugly things to be found in beautiful moments, and the beautiful moments to be found in ugly places. It has been a real privilege to present it to you today.