[Guest Writer] Rain, Again by Charlena Kea

 Uncle, it is happening again.

The rain has come.

I have spent thousands of nights praying that the world would realize something when they pulled your small body from the river. How delicate life is. How precious. How it floats and swells and then vanishes in even the gentlest currents. I prayed you would be more than a forgotten proverb. In a story about big men in faraway places. Their empty fists and uncalloused fingertips meeting tabletops unscathed. And the rain falling faithfully in turn.

They say they are here to protect us. That we are safe behind a blinding cloud of rubble and the dust of month-old bones. But I always wonder why they did not protect you; my most precious kin. I wonder what it is that must be offered to deserve their protection. Because your fluttering pulse and brand new eyes for an old and broken world were not enough. A child’s body and a child’s heart is not enough. They didn’t protect you when the squall of fire and metal touched down on the land that birthed you. And they do not protect me from the thought of your bloated body on the river bank.

I want to scream about false gods and sheep skin. How they have crawled up a festering pile of familiar corpses and made their home on this hill. How they sit behind plaques that read savior and strip valor off of bodies still alive. Stolen courage. And strength. And the wisdom to know how precious you were. I know so little, but enough to know better than to think it is them that would have protected you.

Unbeknownst to them, I have seen what it is to protect and honor life. I have watched generations of our blood run thick in the sacrifice for our most helpless. Our most precious. Your eldest brother, plucked from boyhood and saddled with a child soldier’s burden. I think he must have thought of you from where he lay face-up in the trench. A starry sky punctuated by shrapnel spray down the barrel of the gun they thrust into his quivering hands. Your middle sister rocking you to sleep to the sound of raining shells in the darkness. I think she would have kept singing broken comforts to you even as the explosions swallowed her whole.

Uncle, I know if our times had crossed, you would have fought for me too. Lulled me to sleep as the world burnt around us. I am not so conceited to think myself precious, but I know a fierce love of our kin is written into our code and every fiber of our skin. By this code I am blessed to know what heroes look like. They lean humbly in door frames and pass me seconds across the table. They stroke my hair and pray I am always fed. And they are always always always haunted by your tiny ghost.

I am cursed to know those that claim our protectors’ names. I am not so easily fooled to think it is not vitriol and poison that spurns them. I have watched them rewrite all our stories to claim the hero’s name. They stay in their high up places. So high that the splatter of blood and the shrieks of slow death do not touch their lips or their ears. To them, from their distant perch, the rain they summon is soundless. And in their blindness and deafness, they have placed an everlasting curse on our bloodline. A curse I wake up to every morning. For I have never seen the rain, but it shatters my skull in the silence.

I know you watch with me, Uncle. My pitiful tears fall heavy at your feet. I am not blameless. All the steps I’ve taken, the words I’ve uttered and shouted and silently let slip from moving lips, they will never amount to what was lost when the water swallowed you whole. Even still, I sometimes think to count myself amongst the ones that tried to save you. In my feeble attempt to grasp for your name, to conjure up a memory of bright brown eyes and soft round cheeks and curious hands that clutched at fronds and dried fish.

I pray and pray and pray that you never leave me alone and that you forever whisper at me to yell and fight and struggle for the last breath that the black water stole from you.

So I ask you now. Because it is happening again. The rain comes thick and heavy across sacred land. The children who are swallowed whole by the rubble and the flames, do they walk with you, Uncle? Do you watch together as I weep silently in my cowardly rage? Do you watch together as I kneel at the most precious feet, grasping at empty air, braiding dried flowers into wispy hair?

Uncle, can I ask this too? Are you angry? Has a venomous cloud followed your trail like it has started to follow me? Do you breathe the same hatred for those who stay steadfast in their menace and greed as they watch small faces pale and blacken and bloody? Because I think I am growing tired and bitter from this poisoned air that I push through my lungs. Tireder still because I think we are doomed for an eternity more of fiery rain that rattles spines and singes metallic air. An eternity more of the smallest bodies condemned to martyrdom for faraway men on a hill built from our skin.

Tell me how to keep going when my faith has run dry, Uncle. Tell me how to mourn and then how to forgive. Tell me what words I can say, and what paths I can take to stop this relentless rain. Because we’ll never meet, but still your absence reverberates through every one of my tired bones. And I think, to spend my life protecting you - that is the only thing left for me to breathe.

Charlena Kea is a Cambodian-Chinese American UX/UI designer and illustrator from Portland, Oregon. She graduated summa cum laude from the University of Oregon with her Bachelor of Architecture and has since spent her time making odd things like buildings, zines and mobile applications. She has lived in Italy and Spain and has a heart for traveling and learning languages. She always has her sketchbook and micron pens in tow and is on the lookout for her next adventure.