Send Down the Rain

by Charles Martin

“That this hard heart you keep poking at was once tender and knew how to laugh and love and feel deeply. No amount of stents will bring that back.”

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.”

In matters of the heart, we have only two options. Hate them or love them. That’s it. That’s all we got. There’s no middle.”

“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.’”