The Rain-Name, Mispronounced

Why wait? You have a diary, a flashlight, and a name described as a sound like rain starting. How hard can weather be to pronounce?

You stand at the split tree at half past midnight and give it your very best try.

What you say, according to Sera — who heard it from the cellar and describes it as carefully as a scholar of ancient languages — is not rain starting. It is closer to a bathtub emptying through a kazoo. The old scar politely pretends not to have heard. The new scar, however, hiccups.

The tree burps out: one gust of wind smelling powerfully of 1976 (hay, pond water, somebody's strawberry shampoo), one extremely startled owl from the far marches who files a complaint in owl the whole way around the orchard, and one sound like a slammed shutter that rolls down the hill to the fence line — where five wolf heads snap up in perfect unison, suddenly and intensely interested in the tree, the hill, and the small pajamaed linguist standing next to both.

You make it back over the windowsill with a personal best time and a new understanding: doors this old get opened properly, with your whole family, at dawn — or not at all.