Yellow leaves crowd the porch steps. Just in the corners. They look like small yellow fish, swimming in compressed triangles. Caught in an easy trap of wooden boards nailed together. 

I think about this when I press call. I thought I would call you. That it might be nice to skid onto a landing strip and stare at a screen with a missed call from me. When I dropped you off, windbreaker shoulder still wet from your goodbye, I thought about calling you. I am on the porch with yellow leaves sardined into the steps’ corners and it is four in the morning. 

The porch is canopied by the second floor. At four in the morning, the rainstorm creates walls around the porch. Small waterfalls are splashing onto the chipped planks, onto my feet. The planks creak under my weight. The drone of the heavy rain drowns out the phone at my ear. I know it will go to voicemail. 

“Hey. It’s me.”

A car drives past the house. The headlights sluice past me. I am only in a shirt and thigh-worn sweatpants. A small gust from the car hits my arms, raising gooseflesh in a second. It turns into the thinnest street possible, an alley between a parking garage and a small house that almost leans over the curb. The street is one way, spillage from the parking garage onto a residential street. The car should not be going through it from this side. But it is four in the morning and I am the only one to see.

“Hope your flight is going well. Gone well. You know. Whenever you hear this. I just thought I would call. That you would like a call. It’s four in the morning here. I couldn’t sleep. Obviously.” I’m sniffling, the rain and cold commandeering my comfort. “You know it’s funny—”

The porch creaks under my feet. I am wearing cream-colored slippers, the ones my mother gave me months ago, the ones I wear inside so the bottoms of my feet do not track all the dirt into my bed. We only have hardwood floors. The orange kind that are long and thin and old. Walking barefoot for more than twenty paces makes the invisible soil of the indoors cling to your soles. But I am wearing them outside on the porch and the wet is already climbing into the worn shoe beds. The rain bounces off the chipped paint and onto my toes. There is a vine crawling up a porch banister and down to the floor that hugs the width of the deck. 

“It’s funny. I wanted to tell you about the street I live on. When you were here.”

There is one street lamp, towards the end of the street, the end that opens up to the rest of the world. On one side houses are asleep in the early morning rain and the other is the four story parking garage. It looms. A concrete box with long rectangular cuts of light spanning each floor. The lights are bright white and shine into my windows at night. In the rain, I can see it traveling physically in the air. It dashes between slices of rain and turns the spaces brown. Even in the porch’s canopy the light washes the air brown. 

“You know the parking garage. I think it bothered you at night. You didn’t tell me but I felt like you didn’t sleep. It was too bright through the shades. But the parking garage is for the hospital. Did you know I was born there?” I breathe out long and slow then quickly breathe my cloudy breath back up, catching it in my mouth then my lungs. “I wanted to tell you. The deadend of the street. Past the chain link fence is the hospital. I’m sure you saw it. The hospital is big. Did you see it? The entrance is on the main road. It faces away from my street. You can’t even see it because of the parking. But at the end of the street past the chain links there’s some sliding doors. It’s where I came out. As a kid. Baby. That’s where the mothers come out with their babies. I thought that was nice. I thought you’d like that too.”

The rain is pounding so hard I can barely hear my voice. Thick streams pour around the porch, putting me in the negative space of non-rain. The porch keeps creaking. I wonder if the trains are passing by a mile away. I wouldn’t be able to hear. 

It rained the whole time you were here. It was a few days. The rain came in waves. It drizzled on Tuesday so we thought it was ending. We went to a strawberry field. The place you love. By the time we got out of the car, the rain was solid with no air in between, all the air being pushed into the ground by the sky. We screamed on our way to the small building, cackles spattering to the ground. There was an umbrella in the backseat but we ran in it anyways. 

And you ran ahead. You didn’t care that your shoes were white and the road was made of packed dirt loosened and churning up in pools of water. The ground gurgled at your enthusiasm, celebrating the press of your feet into the earth. You were fifteen feet ahead of me and I felt a million miles inside of myself. Like I was knocking on my shell, watching myself watching you inside myself.

But I’m not there. I’m on the porch. I pull my phone from my ear because I’m wondering how long this message is getting. It’s slick with sweat from the side of my head or maybe it’s the rain. Either way, when I tap the screen, it stays dark. Just a black glass and smudged sweat and the slight suggestion of my face looking back at me. It must have died during the call. 

Without the phone, without my talking to you, the sounds around me close in. The rain isn’t just rain. It’s slaps of bare feet on wet asphalt and bodies landing on shallow pools and dogs slurping at bare water troughs. There’s rubber tires being thrown over heads and flags plastered and unplastered from poles. A father shouting over a fallen tree. Elbows clattering against hundreds of other elbows. It’s the only thing in the world.

Until a car alarm starts in the parking garage. Then the rain is just rain again. And I should have realized that there would be cars in the parking garage at this time. It’s a hospital parking garage. Hospitals don’t close. Always people passing through and staying inside and doctors and nurses and mothers and grandmothers and babies and children and some of them leaving out the door that I left. And me beyond the chain link fence, staring at the parking garage with a dead phone. The car won’t stop echoing its lonely horn, chasing its own noise with more noise. I think about my neighbors who might be asleep at four. Could they sleep through the car alarm or are they staring out their windows wishing for the unseen owner to come out to the unseen car and shut it off or does it not matter at all when there’s a warm body next to them on a full sized bed. 

And I think of you again and the voicemail you might get. When it had cut off and what you would think. And if you would listen to it at all. Maybe I should have texted it to you. We don’t even talk that often. Maybe you just wanted to think about the strawberry farm and the rain. Not the hospital or the street. 

I cannot think of you anymore. The car alarm keeps on but now there’s other noises between the rain and wind. It’s cooling off, the rivers trailing into streams into creeks. The storm is just rain and the rain is just mist. But there are voices in the air now. Lots of them. At four in the morning. The voices are swelling, taking up the space that the rain used to. And out the sliding doors I came out of are mothers and nurses and babies crying into fresh wet earthy air. The mothers standing in their hospital nightgowns, linen and paper tied with thin strings at the back, some of them not even tied. Some of them barefoot on the rough sidewalk, moss and worms damp and whirling from the rain. Some being pushed out on beds. In the dark morning, the only light is from the parking garage and the street lamps and the inside of the hospital through the glass sliding doors. The women are milling about in their large paper gowns, billowing softly like white and pink and blue jellyfish. Some of them are holding their babies, some of the nurses holding the babies. Men, probably the husbands, stand listlessly in dark clothes. And they’re all talking. But I cannot hear the words. 

A different siren careens forward. In the alley, red and blue lights are flickering in quick succession. I can’t see the fire trucks but that’s what they sound like. There’s a thunking of heaviness falling into the potholes outside the hospital. The rain is almost gone now. I actually can’t tell because the porch keeps dripping steadily. More people come out of the sliding doors, frantic and billowy. They gather in one large group, bodies uncomfortable in the soaked air and casually colliding with each other. 

There’s some shrieking rising above the talking mumbling frothing. A female voice arching through the crowd. From behind the parking garage, a few firefighters run to the sliding doors. Even from the porch, I can hear their clunky steps break through the thin nightgowns swirling outside. 

I decide to walk down the street. Maybe I’ll see things better from there. I’ll tell you about them. About the excitement only found at four in the morning while you are hundreds of miles away. So I trot down the porch steps, past rain flicking up at my ankles. The wood moans against my weight. I walk towards the chain link fence separating me from the people streaming like fish. A few women turn to look at me emerging from under the parking deck light in slept-in clothes. Their faces are worried but almost relieved to see someone beyond their situation. Maybe I am a reminder there is a place outside of the hospital their babies are coming out of. By the time I reach the fence, I can feel how much water my slippers have soaked up. The cream color is now a spattered brown and my feet sink into the cushion under them like the floor of a lake. 

I reach out to the fence. It’s decorated with thin vines, the woody stems twisting around the links like they were built to accommodate the wire. This season there are no leaves, just the vines stuck in a lifeless pose waiting for warmth to wake them up again. At first, I am just watching. There are more firefighters now. Their heavy coats huff with each step. I don’t notice until she’s right in front of me. A woman in a blue paper gown comes to meet me. She tilts her head, hair hanging in a frizz.

“Fire started somewhere in the hospital.”

“Oh.” I had thought so.

“They said it’s probably just a kitchen fire.”

“Okay.”

The woman shrugs and looks back at the doors. We can’t see any smoke or signs of strangeness. Just the women milling around and the heavy coats huffing on the firefighters’ shoulders. Still.”

“You all had your babies already?”

“I think. Yeah. Maybe not.” We look over at the women in beds.

“Congratulations.”

She gives me a bare smile, contingent only on the rise of her cheeks rather than the deep willingness yours have. “We’ll see. Her name’s Josephine.”

“Is she out here?”

“She’s inside.”

“Oh.”

“Was it raining hard? I could hear it from inside.” She looks down at my slippers, at my thigh-worn pants, through the woody vines and chain links. Her gown picks up a little in the breeze and her legs are mapped with gooseflesh. “My wife. She’s still inside. They only evacuated our wing. I think she was getting snacks.”

“It was torrential. But it’s cleared up now.”

“I’m glad. Wouldn’t have wanted to come outside otherwise.”

I let out a short laugh, the kind of quick gust of wind that slams a screen door. 

“You don’t think the fire was that bad, do you?” Her voice is steady.

“No. Not if they only evacuated some of you.” I try to reach her with my eyes. I hang my fingers on the fence. “I was born here. I came out of those doors there.”

Her eyes smile, this time a real one, half a second and then it’s gone. She reaches out and gently catches my fingers still caught in the fence. Hers are freezing against mine. The fence gives a stunted swing at her hand’s movement. The non-leafed vines reach like fingers to our fingers, tan and brown. “And now you live here.”

“Yeah.”

“It was probably just a kitchen fire. Couldn’t have been that bad.”

“Not at all. They just wanted to make sure.”

“What were you doing up? It’s early.”

“Making a phone call.”

She shakes her head. “It’s early.”

“I felt alone.”

Her fingers press into mine, something neither of us can ignore. Even through the vines and chain links, our coldness and warmth are seeping into each other. Her fingers, so freezing a minute ago, are my temperature. 

A firefighter, hidden in the crowd of squirming mothers, shouts an all clear. A few cheers sound across the pink and blue paper gowns, a resounding sigh settling in the space between the thin rain. The woman tangled in my fingers looks over to the doors. I cannot see her face but her shoulders sag. She turns back to me with another real smile, this time it sticks in the crinkles of her face. “I’d better go back in.” Her fingers withdraw from mine.

I watch the mothers, nurses, babies, and fathers enter the hospital again. The bustling from earlier has dulled to a relaxed trickle. The woman disappears into the shoal, floating gown matching those around her. I stand there until the fire trucks are pulling out, lights turned off. The morning is gray now, venturing out of the dark I called you in. When the parking garage lights turn off, I make my way back to the porch. A few early commuters are starting their cars in the street, sleepiness softening their movements. The wet ground littered with wet leaves absorbs the sounds of car doors closing. I tenderly make my way up the porch steps, trying not to make noise. Inside, I know my housemates are sleeping. The yellow leaves cluttered in the corners of the steps are still intact, the piles glistening in the dim light. My slippers track shadows of mud on the hardwood floors, a stamp of myself.

You call me an hour later. You tell me you miss the trees here and the lack of rain there and that the parking garage lights didn’t bother you in the slightest.


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