The Word

by Bill Connor

About the Author: Bill Connor has a MFA from Seton Hill University.

Excerpt

Rain. There had been a sprinkling back in late September and nothing since. Now, on a dark February afternoon, it came down in sheets and had been for a day and a half. It soaked down to the caliche, hard as rock, then sheared off, running downhill, flooding back yards and streets and highways, filling washes and dry riverbeds, threatening the bridges across the Salt. The sky hung dark and low. It seemed like the rain would never stop.

The cold burned deep into Rennie’s bones. He sat on plastic milk crates stacked three high, his feet out of the puddles that turned his camp into a lake. A shelter of heavy cardboard crates, smashed flat and wired together, that had stood tall against two searing desert summers, now melted around him. He shivered under a sweater, a coat and a poncho made out of a plastic garbage bag.

“Hello?”

He’d sat shivering, clenched tight into a ball since yesterday, ticking off each slow minute. No surprise that a voice would spring from nowhere.

“Hello?” A woman’s voice.

Rennie bent to look under the drooping cardboard. A pretty woman holding a big golf umbrella stood there in yellow rain boots and a parka. Water washed around her ankles.

She stooped to see his face and smiled at him. “Are you Mr. Rennie?”

Rennie tried to talk, but couldn’t. Generally he yelled at strangers to go away, threatening them with a cricket bat he’d found in the trash.

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