It rained again last night, and once again early this morning the children came running around my window, laughing and giggling as they splashed through the puddles, having the time of their lives.

God, how I wish they’d go away. How I just wish they’d leave me alone.

I moved into the new house only a few weeks ago. Most of the boxes aren’t even unpacked yet. In the past, that was always Anne’s chore. On our previous moves, she would have had everything unpacked, put away, and arranged within a day or two. But Anne’s gone now, so it falls to me, and I just can’t seem to get up the energy.

Alone now and cut adrift, I spent the first few days in what was supposed to be our new home just shuffling around, feeling lost and trying to get my bearings.

Late on the second night, as I twisted back and forth under the sheets, searching for the slumber that increasingly, as I become older, eludes me, it began to rain.

At first, the sound was welcoming. I’ve always, especially at night, enjoyed the sound of rain falling outside while I’m safe and sound inside. In no time at all, the light pattering against the window lulled me to sleep.

The next morning, I woke up to hear a kid giggling outside my window.

As I slowly came awake, I could hear him (or maybe her; at the youngest ages it’s hard to tell the difference) as plainly as possible. Running back and forth, splashing through water, laughing and shrieking at his own happiness as only the very young, or very innocent can.

I could hear him (or her) plainly. And although it seemed kind of odd, as hard as I strained my hearing I couldn’t hear other than the one.

But when I got up and looked out the window, concerned that some small child had wandered away from home in the night, I couldn’t see anybody.



It’s not a new house, not one that we had especially built for our twilight years. Actually, it’s not even in the same town where Anne and I lived for most of our adult lives. We happened upon it, the town that is, one weekend as we were driving back home from visiting her parents in Chicago.

(This was a little over a year ago, and while Anne had worried me for some time by looking tired and run down, we didn’t yet know of the creeping killer nestling inside of her.)

Happening upon this little township in the hills, we decided to stop for a quick lunch.

It was in the middle of the day in the middle of the week. Middle of summer, too. The only time of the year I could take a couple of weeks off. After a lingering lunch in the local café, we spent close to an hour walking back and forth along the main street, looking in store windows, resting on a park bench, and stopping to watch the kids hanging out in front of a small, old-fashioned ice-cream parlor. The kids themselves didn’t appear much like the kind I was used to. They seemed clean-cut, if a bit rowdy, and not interested in causing any trouble, unlike the ones who had usually darkened my office door for so many years.

Anne just fell in love with the place. We were barely back on the highway before she hesitantly ventured the idea of moving there after I retired. Looking over at her, she seemed more alive, more carefree, than I’d seen her in years. As if all the stress she’d carried around for so long had finally lifted a little.

We both knew I only had a year to go before mandatory retirement, so rather than give her an answer right away I agreed to think it over.



I stayed in bed this morning for hours, long enough for the rain to stop and the sun to come out, before I dared crawl out from under the sheets. The kids had quit running around about an hour before, their high-pitched, keening laughter suddenly stopping, as if a switch had been thrown.

When I finally did get up, I didn’t even bother going to the window to look for evidence of their presence. I knew from past experience that I wouldn’t find anything.

They never leave traces.



With barely a year to go until I cashed it in, we had plenty of time to locate a house for sale close to the town, although still some way out in the country. At the time we purchased it, the nearest neighbors were about half a mile away, with the house itself shaded by large, overarching trees on three sides, just the sort of place for a former school administrator to unwind and recoup from decades in the trenches. We found the house and closed the deal with three months to go until my last day on the job.

Then, on the same day that the district grudgingly held a retirement party for me, Anne went to the doctor because of a nagging headache she couldn’t seem to shake. At the same time that Dr. Henderson was giving a canned speech, paying lip service to the idea that the district wouldn’t be the same without me, Anne began the series of tests that eventually derailed all our plans.

So there I was, barely three months later (the damned thing, once discovered, had spread faster than anyone had thought it would), moving into our dream house on the outskirts of our dream town all on my own.

Then and forever.

I’d contemplated abandoning the whole thing. Keeping our place in the city and vegetating away inside of it. But I doubted that Anne would have wanted that, and it would keep me in too close proximity to the school and all the memories associated with it.

So I made the move, on my own and with nothing much to look forward to.

And on the second night, the rain came.

And on the second morning, I awoke to the sound of that child running and shrieking through the puddles.



The rain and storms started almost as soon as I moved into the house. It was one of those weather systems that sometimes hit the Midwest in the summertime, where a cell of moisture seems to pick an area at random and hang over it for days, or even weeks, without budging. Even when it didn’t actually storm, the air hung heavy with all the humidity, making skin and clothing stick and cling to each other. So the third night, when the first few drops of moisture hit the windows, I didn’t really think much about it. I was prepared for nothing more onerous than my usual tossing and turning for hours on end before finally dropping off to a kind of drugged slumber. I may have thought briefly about the odd incident when I woke up that morning, but if so it formed nothing more than a passing glimmer through my mind.

Early the next morning, I woke up to the sound of small voices.

Voices, in the plural this time. As I lay there, I could make out the tones of two different kids. Laughing, giggling, and running back and forth, splashing and carrying on in total innocence.

I remember smiling, despite the fact that they were right outside my window. I’ve always liked kids, the well-behaved ones at least, which probably dictated my choice of profession. So rather than be upset, I eventually got up and went to the window to talk to them.

And once again saw no one there.

The rain had slackened, down to little more than a sprinkle, and giant slow drops fell from the leaves of the large oak tree a few feet from my window. Both the house and the tree sit on a bit of a decline, with the result that two or three large puddles had formed just a yard or two from my window.

And that’s all I saw. The grass, the tree, the moisture everywhere, but no children.

Except I could still hear them. It sounded, as much as one could tell, like a boy and a girl. Their voices were as clear as if they stood just a few feet away, mingling and forming into that meaningless high-pitched shrieking.

They were right outside my window.

So where were they?

My heart tripped a beat, maybe two, and I stepped away from the window and plopped back onto the bed. Wiping a sudden sweat off my forehead, I wondered if all the recent changes in my life, some expected and some unexpected, had done something to my mind.

Then, just as I started to get up and go to the window again, convinced that the kids were somewhere nearby and I just hadn’t seen them, the voices stopped.

They didn’t fade away, decrease in volume or run off. They just ceased, as if a curtain had been drawn.

A couple of moments later, the rain stopped entirely, and for some time I did nothing but sit there and wonder.

Then, as I lay there, the crystal clear solution came to me. Of course, the kids had been playing and running somewhere close by, and with the bedroom window being the only one open in the house, obviously that that’s where I thought the sounds had come from.

Obviously.

Occam’s Razor. The simple, straightforward solution.

So why didn’t it feel right?



The next few days and nights were fairly clear, with just a light misting now and then. The weather system still hung over us, but it had gone into a placid phase.

I spent the time as productively as I could. When I had the energy I swept, unpacked, and arranged things. But most of the time I didn’t really have the energy, and I ended up sitting wherever was convenient until the latest flight of self pity went away.

It wasn’t just that I missed Anne. My whole life, my job and hobbies had vanished on me. I knew that somehow I had to get myself back on track, but I didn’t have a clue as to how to go about it.

I thought occasionally of going a couple of miles down the road into the township. Doing a formal job of meeting the residents, getting acquainted, seeing if anyone would be up for a game of cards and a couple of beers. A couple of people had even stopped by, including the youngish couple that owned the house closest to mine, but despite my best intentions for company, every time someone came by to introduce themselves they left after just a few minutes.

On the other hand, I often thought of picking up the phone and calling Tod or Jan. It would be good to hear their voices, and talking to them would possibly help dull the sharp grief I still carried from their mom’s passing.

But that was the heart speaking, while the mind knew differently. Neither one wanted to hear from me. Although five years apart in age, once they’d grown up and left the house they’d both developed the same attitude.

Occasionally, very occasionally, they’d contact their mother, usually by letter. But after moving away, neither my daughter or my son had wanted anything to do with their old man.

I can still picture the day of Anne’s funeral. The kids were there, of course, their Aunt Linda having called them when Anne passed. More for the sake of appearances than anything else, they had sat in the front pew with me, so that from behind we probably looked like a united family.

But the coldness still existed, the separation hadn’t altered one bit, and while Jan and her husband sat scrunched as closely as possible to Tod, they kept an obvious separation of nearly a foot from me.



The fifth night in the new house, with me still not having gone into town proper, the rains returned. Not unusual for the middle of summer in the Midwest, of course, but when the drops began beating down just as I crawled into bed, I felt a faint flicker of apprehension.

They woke me up early the next morning.

The kids.

Running, laughing and splashing like before.

Sounded like several of them this time.

It was still almost completely dark out, the actual dawn still a long ways off. It made me wonder, briefly, just how long they were out there each day before I became aware of them, how much time they spent enjoying themselves outside my window before I awoke.

Although I knew I was wide awake, everything felt completely unreal, like out of a bad dream. So I lay there silently, barely breathing, hoping that they’d go away and my world would be sane again.

More than two, now. Sounded, although I was groggy enough to not be entirely sure, like at least four. Then, in the midst of all the nonsensical noise, I heard my name called out.

“Dr. Hearat.”

The words soft, almost whispery. But I heard them clearly enough.

“Dr. Hearat?”

I held my breath, closed my eyes and worried about what I would think or do when I heard my name again.

But nothing. Instead, just like before, the noises stopped, and though I didn’t get up, I knew that were I to look outside I’d see nothing but trees, ground and grass.

Not a mistake, then. Not some kind of random occurrence.

Although they wouldn’t let me see them, they’d made it clear that they were here for me.



Stress, the obvious answer. Lord knew that I’d gone through enough in the last few months, let alone the last several years, to have the excuse of what they used to call in the old days, a “fatigued brain.” But I couldn’t quite convince myself of that. And if it was just a matter of hearing things, instead of the usual seeing things, what was my subconscious trying to tell me?



Three clear days and nights. Or, if not clear, at least not raining. Gloomy and cloudy, with the moisture hanging around, sure. But no rain. Days when I managed to scrounge up a bit of effort, do some unpacking, even arrange the furniture a couple of different ways until I had it the way I liked. It struck me once, somewhat traitorously, that arranging the furniture seemed easier now than in times past. Only one of us to make a decision, and no knockdown dragout arguments afterwards as to how the house should look.

Nights when I read some, watched a bit of TV, and spent a lot of time supine on the couch, listening to some classical music. Nice to enjoy it uninterrupted. Another slight advantage to my present situation.

Anne, after all, had always been more of a country/western type.

Went into town on the third day, to pick up a few more groceries, and got to talking to a couple of the locals. One of them actually invited me to his place for dinner. I thought about it, then with a sheepish shrug and a mumbled apology, turned him down. Ready made excuse in the fact that I’m still mourning.

I’ll get back into society some day, but at the moment I don’t quite trust myself. The pain of losing Anne is too new, the irritation and frustration from the way they treated me the last year or two at work still too fresh. And it’s been a long time, since long before Anne’s diagnosis, since I...

Just don’t trust myself around people yet.

Talking with the guys there in the store, I almost asked them about the kids I kept hearing after each rainstorm. Got so far as starting to change the conversation, then caught myself in time.

It would have come out like crazy talk, and that’s the last thing I need at this point in my life.

No way do I want a new round of rumors starting up.



After three dry but cloudy nights, the rain began again. I was reclining in my favorite chair, listening to one of Vivaldi’s better pieces, when I caught the first faint, tinny drops against the window. Immediately, my heart skipped. I’d managed in the last day or so to partially convince myself that it had all been my imagination, but now with new precipitation coming down, the worry returned.

I managed to concentrate on the music for only another twenty minutes or so when the real downpour began. The clouds above didn’t open up so much as they disintegrated and let loose a torrent like I hadn’t experienced in years. Shivering, shaking, I turned off the CD player, shut off the lights, and crawled into bed.

I viewed the experience as something like an experiment. Lying in bed, eyes closed, I concentrated on making my mind a blank. If I kept low key enough and focused on everything normal around me, I’d surely wake up to an ordinary morning.

No such luck.

The sound of kids laughing and running tugged me out of sleep.

That and more.



They were calling out to me, and I began to figure out just what was going on. It’s pretty clear that I’m not deranged or delusional, although I may soon wish that I am.

“Dr. Hearat. Are you awake yet? Why don’t you come out to us?”

Two or three of them, sounding like they were crouched just beneath my window. While the sound of others playing alongside, these two or three were calling to me.

“Dr. Hearat? Why won’t you come out to us?”

I didn’t move, didn’t even attempt to look outside. Instead, I lay in bed, nearly paralyzed and barely breathing. Unlike the other times, the rain hadn’t stopped with the morning, although it had slacked some. Regardless, the kids were out there, having a ball and tormenting a helpless old man. Once or twice, I thought I recognized individual voices.

I can’t be sure, though, because when I encountered the children in the past, back when I had my hobbies, I did my best to steer clear of any who went to the school where I worked.

Figured it was safer that way.

Be nice to think that I’m just a lonely old man slowly going crazy.

Be nice to think that, wouldn’t it?



Memories coming back to me now. Fragments and figments of times past. Some of the good times. Anne and the kids. At least until they turned into such turds. Some of the good days at work. Especially after I finally clawed my way out of the classroom, stopped teaching math six hours a day, and got into administration.

But too few good times and too many bad ones. Looking back, with that proverbial twenty-twenty hindsight, it seems that I could have done things differently. If I had, if I’d conducted myself some other way, approached life from some other perspective, maybe things wouldn’t be as they now are.

Anne still would have had the cancer, of course. Unless the stress of living with me helped cause it. But even if she had still died, I probably wouldn’t be a lonely old man, hiding under the covers, afraid of a bunch of children that he can hear but not see.

On the other hand, maybe I don’t really need to see them.

I think I already know what they look like, their images seared into my memory down the years.

The fact that they call me “Dr. Hearat” is almost a dead (bad pun there) giveaway. It’s not just any old geezer they’re seeking out, not just whoever happens to own this particular house.

Which means that the natural inclination to run like hell wouldn’t do any good.

They’re here for me, and my guess is they’d find me wherever I went.

And there seem to be more of them each time they come.



Last night, the pattern again. Fatigue, despite the tension and worry, overcoming all else. I nodded off, headed into a sleep punctuated with vague, ill-defined worries. Opening my eyes to a cloudy morning, gummy lids resisting nature, and the sound of children outside.

More of them, this time. Lots more, by the sound of it. Enjoying the hell out of themselves, as kids will do, sporting in their cruelty while a helpless old man lies in bed, too goddamned afraid to even look outside his window. Nearly two hours lying in bed before the rain finally went away and took them with it.

No big deal. They’ll just be back later.

Persecuted again.

Once more, seemingly my entire life filled with people out to get me.

I can’t run from them, they’ll find me. And I can’t fight what I can’t see.

So what can I do?

God, if only Anne was here to look out for me, as she always did in the past.



I’m somewhat out of place in this community, it didn’t take long to discover. Although quaint, rural, and filled with retired people, most of them aren’t of my social standing. Blue-collar, more than anything, with hardly any professional people sprinkled in. Hard to find common ground among such folks.

For most of them, the words “school” and “principal” are probably tinged with bad associations. The times they had to take off from their hourly jobs to deal with misbehaving offspring. The parent/teacher conferences, if they ever attended, where they heard all the bad news they’d been avoiding, then turned around and blamed it on someone else. The times they opened their mail and got notice of their property taxes going up.

(Is it any wonder I had to find some way, any way, to relieve the stress of the job?)

Not easy to relate with people such as these without bad memories springing up.

And I’ve got enough bad memories haunting me, running around outside my window each time it showers.

Besides, not that much of a loss. Outside of Anne, I never did care much for the company of adults. Never really had much in common even with the people at work. Sure, they tolerated me, as they had to do their boss. But the school community’s a funny thing, with so much gossiping and backstabbing going on.

In my time, I had my own sort of scarlet letter to deal with. Change schools often enough, have the higher-ups move you around a few too many times, regardless of how well you did your job, and the ones beneath you, the idle gossips who should have gone about their own business, can’t help but start their tongues to wagging.

Little wonder, then, that I’d spend my time with younger, more innocent ones.

All innuendo, anyway. Was any evidence ever found?



I broke out into a sweat the other night as I watched the local news. It wasn’t the news itself that bothered me. Around a hick place like this, the results of a local pie-eating contest or the opening of a new flower shop two counties over constitutes current events.

No, the weather report shook me up.

This young punk kid, looked just out of college and dressed in his older brother’s hand-me-down suit, standing in front of his fancy graphic screen, had to look and sound so goddamned cheerful as he forecast four straight days of...

I’ve noticed myself losing weight recently, something Anne was always after me to do, in a mild way, of course, when she was alive. I sat there in my recliner, fidgeting as the weather forecast droned on.

I should be able to go away. Just get in the car and drive.

Or I could go into town, get a hold of a few locals and explain the situation to them.

I almost picked up the phone to call Tod, but resisted. The last time we spoke (we did not speak at Anne’s funeral) was the day he left the house for good.

I could do any or all of those things, but it’s starting to sink in that none of them would be effective.

It’s going to rain tonight. I sat there, watching the TV, as that hideous blob of green on the map kept growing and growing.

I know who those kids are. Not their names. I don’t remember names well, if I ever knew them.

But I’m pretty sure I know what they want.

A faint noise, barely discernible, at the window. Almost before I could blink, the one drop became two, then four, then a flurry.

Right on schedule.



A deluge. No other way to describe it. Within minutes, the shower became a downpour, which became a deluge. They’ll probably be posting flood warnings tonight and tomorrow.

A literal wall of water right outside my living room window. I turned the lights off shortly after it began and stood there, trembling and shaking, my skin crawling so badly that I wanted to tear it off.

Irrational, when you think about it. Should the pattern hold, I’ll be safe through the night. They’ll only appear when morning comes.

I think about a dog I had when I was young. A puppy really. He didn’t live much past two years old. But he had this habit, when he’d done something bad and knew I was looking for him. He would always scoot to a corner of the house and, butt facing the room, shove his head and face all the way into the corner. Then he’d lay down, safe under the assumption that since he couldn’t see me, I couldn’t see him.

Our first and last attempt to have a pet in the family.

Am I like that dog now? Do I stay, awake and standing, in the living room, thinking that if I can’t hear the kids, they won’t exist? Each time there’s been more of them. The last time it sounded like nearly thirty. But that couldn’t be right, could it?

Surely there weren’t that many over the years.

Nearly three o’clock and still awake and still the rain sheeting down. I haven’t moved off the couch, and I won’t until daylight. Maybe not even then, maybe not even until the storm breaks.

And when it does break, enough of this crap. I’ll lock up the house, get in the car and leave. I’ll drive, as far and as long as I can, until there’s no possible way they can find me.

The whole rotten bunch of them.

The kids who would never act right.

The parents who always complained.

My own two children who never liked their old man.

The superiors who wouldn’t back me up.

Anne who took the easy way out, avoiding this torment of mine altogether.

That stupid damn puppy who could never behave.

Sudden silence, and I look up at the ceiling, a new tremor fluttering in my gut.

The weatherman was wrong. The storm ended early.

And I’m still awake. Which could mean that I’ve beaten it.

I jerk my head towards the front door, not the bedroom this time, as the giggling, laughing, splashing begins. So many voices, more than I can possibly count, carrying on and raising such a ruckus that it would surely wake up the neighbors if I had any.

Calling my name over and over.

Then, suddenly, nothing. Complete, deafening nothing.

I release the breath I hadn’t realized I was holding, but don’t take my eyes off the door.

I can clearly see the knob turning.

The door swings wide open. In the backwashed light from the room, I, of course, don’t see anyone out there.

I realize now that I don’t need to see, don’t even really need to hear.

Sighing, I get up and walk towards the open doorway.

Makes perfect sense, in a way.

I had my fun over the years.

Now it’s their turn to play.