The Boy Who Spoke in Rain
The village floods twice every year. Everyone moves their valuables up to the attic: onions and potatoes, papers and clean clothes. Even the kettle and the chickens have a place on the hill where the rising water never reaches. In May, the village floods for a week, then the rain is scarce until the following September, when it floods again for a week. On some days it does rain, but just enough to rinse the dust off the leaves.
‘Mommy, why are you putting the flour in the attic? There are mice up there,’ the boy asks.
‘The flood, do you remember?’ She wipes her brow. Of course he does, but that’s the way children are, always asking the questions that mothers least like.
Only a few days remain before the flood, when the streets will be swept and everything will be swallowed by the river. It’s always the same colour, somewhere between the brown of soapy water dripping from hands after working in the garden and the murky green of stale pond water. No one had drowned since the mother was but a little girl. Even then, it had been one of the village drunkards, the sort not many cared about.
‘Mommy, we have to take Pip up too!’ the boy says. Sitting on his chair, his legs are close together, slouching.
‘Of course, Philip,’ she waves him away.
Except, when the storm breaks forth with rain hammering the streets, Pip is outside, chasing his tail in circles. The mother lunges, not necessarily to save the dog, but to spare her son from loss. She holds onto the fence with one hand and the other barely brushes against the wet fur. The current grabs Pip. The boy screams, his voice raw with fear, and lunges toward where Pip vanished. His mother scoops him up, holding him back.
He claws at the empty air and screams Pip’s name again and again. His voice is choked with tears. After being dragged inside, he doesn’t say a word. Not when the storm passes and the skies clear, nor when the streets dry and the village returns to its usual silence. For a while, she respects Philip’s silence. She even finds a strange comfort in the stillness between them. She understands it. After all, Pip and Philip were born a few days apart.
She finds him staring where the water took everything in its path, Pip included. He only stares, silent and unblinking, sitting in the very spot Pip was chasing his tail, as if waiting for his turn.
‘Philip, come inside.’
When she touches his shoulder, he flinches. The silence builds inside like a storm and that terrifies her. She’s torn between the urge to shake him and the fear of pushing him further away if she does.
‘Philip, why won’t you speak to me?’ she whispers, now kneeling in front of him. She shakes him, pinches him just below his ribs, pulls on a strand of his brunette hair curling on top of his head. He must speak, if not for anything else, then out of pain. There is no sign of Philip returning to her. He only looks up at the sky, his eyes drifting from one cloud to another. When he finds the threatening cloud, he points at it, as if asking his mother to wait.
‘What is it?’ Speak!’ she orders him, rubbing the back of his neck. Philip says nothing, he raises his hand again and points to the dark-grey cloud. A tuft of wool from a black sheep. Wind-pushed, it moves fast across the pitiless sky. Its shadow crawls over the rooftops until it swells above them. A drop lands on her head, then another. Suddenly, the rain thickens, drumming on the tin rooftops and spattering on leaves noisily. It won’t last long, just enough to soak through clothes.
‘Philip,’ her eyes bulge. ‘What are you saying?’
‘I can only speak when it rains.’ It is the drumming sound of rain that lets him speak.
‘What? Say it again,’ she raises her eyebrows.
‘I can only speak when it rains, Mommy!’
‘Why? Why only then?’ she asks. The clouds begin to tear. The tuft of wool is quietly pulled apart.
‘When it doesn’t rain, I can hear everything.’ Only rainwater is loud enough to drown out everything else.
‘Hear what?’ she swallows her spit.
‘The river coming. Me, screaming. Pip,’ Philip says, barely above a whisper.
Rain slowly fades to a whisper, then to nothing. Shortly after, the sun slips through the clouds and warms everything as it did before. He says nothing more.
‘Philip,’ her voice cracks, ‘Please.’ She grips his shoulder, shakes him before giving up.
The days and weeks that follow are as dry as they are in every year, except now the boy doesn’t play around, doesn’t ask his mother innocent questions she often refused to answer. She now wishes she had met those questions with patience. Instead, he is pale and distant, watching wordlessly where the river was. Dust gathers on the windowsills. The wind brushes past the trees as if scared to linger too long. It’s not only Philip, but the mother feels as if the entire world has gone quiet. Of course, the neighbours haven’t, nor have the chickens in the yard or the sparrows in the lilac bush.
She considers placing a pencil and paper in his hands, except he hasn’t learned to write yet. Not really. His fingers are too unsure, his grip too loose even for drawing. Anyways, she can’t figure out too much from Philip’s drawings. It’s always a dog. Nothing else gives it away but the four legs and the squiggly tail. Next to the dog, a stick figure, a boy. After he finishes, without any hesitation, he takes the dark-green pencil and draws a circle around it. Then, he drowns both in that colour.
‘What if I make rain?’ she drums her feet against the floor. ‘Will you speak then?’
Philip shrugs. It’s not much, but it’s more than nothing.
The first thing she lays eyes on is the washing line above the stove. It would sag very low with clothes if it weren’t for the rod securing it to the ceiling. In her rush to find a sheet, she bumps into the table and knocks over the vase with strawflowers. She soaks the sheet in the remaining rainwater gathered in the barrel. Then, she drapes it over the washing line. Droplets patter against the floorboards.
‘Mummy,’ Philip whispers, ‘do you ever wonder what it’s like deep in the river?’ He sits down under the dripping sheet, cross-legged on the floor.
‘Under what?’ she asks, leaning closer to him. She tilts her head to hear him better.
‘In the river, Mommy!’ His voice was never this fragile, not even when he had the sickness children often catch.
‘What do you mean, Philip?’ she rubs at her left eyebrow.
‘Everything under the puddle is upside-down, like the houses and trees are floating.’
‘What else?’
‘You know, he’s in there,’ his little hands twist in his lap.
‘Who’s in there?’ she asks, but there aren’t enough raindrops for more.
She wets the sheet again, throws it over the line. Water drips again, but he says nothing. Or at least nothing she understands. Then, Philip curls under the droplets and falls asleep. She tries the same thing day after day, but he speaks only words she can’t make out. Then, it comes to her. He spoke the first time because it wasn’t water she drew from the well but rainwater. Their sound can’t be the same. The neighbours are not willing to give her any of the rainwater they collected. It softens their clothes, they say, and the weeks before September will not bring a drop. She offers eggs, sugar and flour, everything they might ask for, anything they might’ve lost in the flood and need. The only one willing to help is the village drunkard, the one whose father drowned. He can spare one bucket of rainwater in exchange for a sack of flour. It is far too high a price, but she doesn’t care.
She takes a tin bucket and the needle meant for puncturing belts. She pierces tiny holes into the bucket’s bottom, controlling the rainwater’s trickle. She will pour one cup of water at a time for the shower to last longer, for the boy to speak more.
‘Come, Philip,’ she sits him into the basin. It will collect the water for later.
‘It’s so quiet in there, like in a dream.’
‘What else is there?’ she asks, pouring another cup of water.
‘People, they float and they’re happy,’ he means they don’t have a care in the world. ‘And he’s there too.’
‘Who? Who is in there?’ she drops the cup in the bucket, and the clink it makes scares them both.
‘Pip is waiting for me in there. I think I could go there, find him!’ His voice is faded, but steady. Philip murmurs again, about life deep in the river, about Pip and wanting to go where Pip is. Shivers run through her. She doesn’t want him to speak anymore, at least not for a while.
The sun warms the village like an oven. The well’s water level drops. Rain will not come easily, nor often enough. At least not as often as she wants to hear Philip’s words. She freezes the last of the rainwater because, left unfrozen, it would only warm and vanish. It has to be kept for a moment that has yet to come. She comforts herself with the thought that September is near and then it will rain for many days.
When enough time passes, she warms the frozen water over the stove. She then places Philip in the basin and, with the watering can, lets the water slowly drizzle over him.
‘If only I could meet Pip again!’ he says.
‘Stop that nonsense, just stop it!’ She knows what he means. ‘Just shut up!’
‘You say that every time, ever since I was born,’ he says. It’s true, her first wish was for the child to shut up, stop crying.
‘That’s not true!’ She scoops a cup of water out of the basin and pours it into the watering can hanging above. While the water drips, she unbuttons the top button of her shirt. It doesn’t match the others.
Philip traces a droplet that’s fallen on her arm and down on one finger. He remembers the day he was born. It rained so badly that when his mother’s water broke, she was already soaked through. He saw the hospital, too, the nurse who pulled him out. His black strands of hair and soft and transparent nails.
‘I remember seeing you through the drops on the window, Mommy.’
Her hand stops mid-air, the cup hangs, the water stops.
‘I also remember the very first thing you said when I was born,’ he steps out of the basin. ‘Make that thing shut up already.’
After all, it is true: she didn’t want him, not like other mothers wanted their boys. At least, she didn’t want him before he was born. It was true, she delighted in the presence of men, yet when her condition became evident to all, she swore the boy was not out of love but from a time her choices were taken away. Now, her heart swells with pride and longing.
‘Mommy, you never listen to what I’m saying!’ That is true. ‘I told you we must take Pip up to the attic!’ That is true, too, but she wasn’t listening.
By the next morning, the village is half-drowned. Water is snaking down the streets, thick and muddy as ever, carrying twigs, wooden planks and hay it picked up from the neighbours’ gardens. Even a wheelbarrow floated past earlier. Nobody is taken by surprise, not anymore. Everybody knows that when September’s first day arrives, everything must be carried and stowed away upstairs again.
Though everything is stored safely, she can’t sleep. The cries of cows stranded on high grounds, the alarmed roosters, the rain, they keep her awake. It’s raining, she realises, so Philip must speak. Except, there isn’t anyone she can speak to. Philip is where Pip is, and all is silent.
József-Sándor Török has a background in Philology (BA) and American Studies (MA). His short fiction has been internally longlisted for the Cambridge Prize for Short Stories & Flash Fiction. He has published work in Poems, Tales & Other English Words magazine, with another story forthcoming in the Spring 2026 issue of another literary journal. He is currently working on his debut novel.