Send Down the Rain

by Charles Martin

You can kill my body and you’d be doing me a favor, but kill my soul and there’s no remedy for the pain. And when you’re in that place, and the pain is real bad, and you’ve been leaning into the thing causing it so long that you don’t know how to do anything other than lean, hope and hopelessness blur and you lose sight of who’s trying to hurt you and who’s trying to help. Sometimes you need somebody to stand between you and the sharp thing that hurts. To lean for you. I touched her hand. “It’ll be okay.”

Hope has a funny way of cracking people down the middle. Cutting through the tough places.

When people become afraid on a soul level, when the terror of their lives has taken up residence in their belly, it becomes the wall behind which they sequester themselves. The only way through is to tunnel under. Meet them inside their perimeter. Problem is, the depth of their pain determines the thickness of the wall.

Soul-wounds are scars on the inside, etched with permanent ink.

Healing comes in both the telling and the hearing.

“The dead have already forgiven the living.”

“Hate is a powerful weapon. But it is powerless when it comes to cutting chains off the human heart.”

Twice a day, the beach cleaned itself. Leaving no residue of yesterday. Maybe that’s why we liked it.

I thought to myself, If she’s laughing, then I can’t be in hell, ’cause I highly doubt there’s laughter in hell. I mean, what would people in hell have to laugh about?

To my mom, that draft notice was an obituary.”

“I’d seen what evil could do. Evil never gave itself for anyone. It takes what it doesn’t own. Holds your head under the water. Rips your head off your neck and dangles it from the city wall. Evil dominates. Controls. Eradicates. Evil is a sniveling punk, and if you let it inside you then you spew hatred, which is just another name for the poison we drink hoping it’ll hurt someone else.”

“But not love. Love rushes in where others won’t. Where the bullets are flying. It stands between. Pours out. Empties itself. It scours the wasteland, returns the pieces that were lost, and it never counts the cost.”

“Love walks into hell, where I sit in chains, where the verdict is guilty, grabs you by the heart, and says to the warden, ‘Me for him.’”

I pulled the brass Zippo out of my pocket. Dull from the decades. I held it up to reveal the worn engraving. My fingertips traced the grooves like Braille. STRENGTH TO STRENGTH. I flipped it over. SEND DOWN THE RAIN. I handed it to him. My tether to hope. “Had it done over there . . .” “Why?” “To help me remember.” “Remember what?” “Mom’s voice.”