Before dawn, when the air was still cool enough to hold her together, Jacob wrapped his daughter in damp towels and carried her into the kitchen. She shimmered faintly in his arms, her edges curling away like steam from a kettle.
He set her down in front of the largest bowl of boiling water. Clouds of vapour rose, and she breathed them in greedily. The towel darkened, heavy with moisture, and her outline grew sharper—two pale hands, a small round face, hair that drifted as if underwater.
“You were nearly gone when I woke,” he said.
She smiled through lips that sometimes weren’t there. “I was dreaming,” she said. “About rain.”
Rain. The word was almost forbidden in Dusthaven now. It hadn’t fallen in three years. The fields beyond the town were cracked mosaics; wells were guarded by armed patrols; even the air seemed reluctant to move. The drought had taken the cattle first, then the crops, and now it was taking the people—one fever at a time.
But she wasn’t sick. The doctor had called her a phenomenon. The neighbours had called her unnatural. His wife, before she left, had called her a mistake.
Jacob called her Clara. And keeping her alive had become the whole shape of his life.
He’d sold the last of the goats for a second-hand humidifier, but the town rationed electricity now, and the machine stood silent most nights. Every coin he earned hauling water barrels for the mayor went to buying steam—wood for the stove, candles to heat pans in the corners of their small cottage, tea kettles that never boiled for tea.
In the evenings, when the heat outside thinned enough for breath, he told her stories: forests so damp the ground squelched underfoot, rivers loud as crowds, skies so swollen with water they burst into silver storms. She listened with wide, flickering eyes, her misted fingers twining with his.
One night, as they sat by the candle-pan, she asked, “What happens if I can’t drink enough air?”
“Then I’ll find more. However far I have to go.”
“But if you can’t?” she pressed.
“You don’t need to think about that.”
But he thought about it every day.
The last water jug emptied at noon a week later. The next delivery wasn’t due until Monday, and the mayor’s guards had stopped letting him take scraps from the well. He tried keeping her still, telling her stories, distracting her from the thinning of her edges. But her face was faint, and her voice came like wind through cracks.
“Dad,” she said softly. “It’s all right.”
“No, no—it’s not. I’ll go to the hills. There might be dew. Just hold on.”
But when he opened the door, the air was a wall of heat. His lungs felt scorched.
He turned back—
She was standing in the middle of the room, hair lifting like smoke.
He stepped forward, but the motion stirred her. A curl of her arm drifted loose.
“Wait—” His voice broke. “Clara, please.”
“Dad,” she said, her face flickering like a candle flame. “I think I’m meant to go.”
“No. I’ll climb to the hills—find dew, or ice in the shadow of stones. Just wait for me.”
She shook her head, the movement sending wisps of her hair unravelling into the warm air. “You’ve kept me here so long. But I don’t belong in one place.”
He crossed to her, his hands trying to hold her shape still, but they passed through the cool shimmer of her.
Outside, the horizon trembled with heat. But above—above was a thin, new thing: a pale wisp of cloud, alone in a sheet of sky.
Her edges began to loosen. Not like water evaporating, but like a path unfolding. She rose, coiling upwards in slow spirals, her outline catching the sun in silver glints.
She paused at the roof beams, her voice drifting down like a breath on glass. “I’ll be the rain.”
Then she threaded herself through the open window, and rose up like a gentle gust of wind to become part of the sky. The lone cloud above swelled, as though it had been waiting for her.
Each day, Jacob stood in the doorway and looked up at the sky.
Sometimes, in the bluest of stretches, he would see a cloud curl into the shape of delicate fingers. And on the mornings when the wind smelled faintly of wet earth, he set out a bowl on the step, knowing she was on her way home.
Robert Walker 