A Fistful of Rain Read Free

together when you’ve seen millions of them from stages all around the world. He seemed big to me, but everyone seems big to me, and when I’m surprised on my porch by a strange man, that’s always going to be factored in for free.
    He also had a gun, and that just added to the whole effect.
    It was so utterly surreal, all I could say was “You’ve got to be shitting me.”
    The man raised the gun, to point it at my head, and said, “Come here.”
    My response was instinctive and contrary, and if I’d thought for a moment, I’d never have said it.
    “Hell no,” I told him.
    “It’s not a choice, bitch.”
    He started coming forward, and the whole strangeness of it ended abruptly, and it became terrifying, instead. I went for my door, which was stupid and I fumbled it, jabbing my key pointlessly at the lock and missing. Then he was on me, and I heard the keys drop as he rammed the gun into my neck, wrapped his bare hand around it. The gun felt blunt and cold, and his grip felt hot and wet, and the cloud of fear that had been gathering coalesced into real panic.
    “You come with me
now,
” he hissed into my ear. “Or I’ll blow you away.”
    The only coherent thought I had then was that I was going to die, probably horribly, and that it wasn’t fair because I wasn’t even supposed to
be
here, I was supposed to be in New York City, and if Van hadn’t handed me my walking papers I would be, and then I wouldn’t have to be raped and murdered on the steps of my own home.
    “Please don’t do this,” I said softly, and it didn’t sound pathetic to me, just sincere.
    His answer was to pull me away from my door and off my porch. He turned me, walked me down the path from my house to the street, between the big apple trees in the front yard, to the sidewalk. Every house was dark, and there was no motion but us and the trees that shivered in the falling rain.
    It seemed to me that I could probably scream for help once before he killed me, and that didn’t seem like a very good option at all.
    Cars were parked along the curb, neighbor vehicles, and he walked me across the street, past a beat-up Chevy to a big Ford truck. The truck had a hardtop over the bed, something to keep it closed and dry, and he told me to open it, and then he told me to climb inside.
    “Please don’t do this,” I said again. “You really don’t want to do this.”
    “You don’t know what I want,” he said. “You better just hope I don’t want all of it. Get in, all the way to the back, then turn around.”
    I had to go on hands and knees to get inside. The bed was lined with a hard black plastic, and the sound of the rain hitting the hardtop was loud. When I reached the far end I turned, watched as he moved his gun into a pocket, keeping his hand on the grip. He looked away from me, back across the street, as if checking on my house, and I could see he was trying to work something out, and I figured that was probably good for me, because if he already had a plan, I wasn’t going to have a chance at all. Not to say I had a chance to begin with, but to tell the truth, my fear had begun to ebb, as if it couldn’t keep up with the bizarreness of it all.
    I wondered if I’d really sobered up, or if I was still drunk.
    The man returned his attention to me, and when he spoke, the fear came back in a cascade.
    “Give me your clothes.”
    “They’re not your size,” I said, meekly.
    His sweatshirt stretched around the barrel of the gun as he thrust it farther in my direction. “You think I’m joking? You think this is some fucking joke, you split-ass bitch? Get out of your fucking clothes.”
    I just stared at him. I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
    “You want me to hurt you? You want me to hurt you and do it myself?”
    I shook my head. The muscles in my jaw were starting to tremble.
    “Do it. Now.”
    It took effort, and it took me finding a justification, it took me telling myself that this couldn’t be what I thought, that