by Myna Chang

The rainmaker drove into town late last night, stirring up whorls of caliche in his wake. Daddy’s afraid the man is a charlatan, doesn’t believe anyone but God can tease water from an unwilling sky. Momma doesn’t say what she thinks. Five years of breathing powdered dirt have left her just enough breath to wheeze, her words like wind across barbed-wire.

They say a precise detonation, high in the sky, will shock the water out of the air. The ladies at church frowned and shook their heads when they heard that kind of talk, but Judith and MaryBeth said their papas took money from the collection plate to pay him. Cash upfront. Their mommas just prayed harder, prayed for their husbands and their foolish, wasteful ways, prayed for the souls of their buried children, prayed for free God-given rain.

Some say the combustion of unstable chemicals will bring life back to the clouds. I don’t know if that’s true, or if this rainmaker can answer my prayers, but he has four cases of dynamite strapped to the bed of his Ford, and the blackest eyelashes I’ve ever seen. He says there are trees downstate—green trees—and whole towns where they’ve never heard of dust pneumonia, never had to shoot their withering cattle or their dogs because there, there in those faraway havens, he says, you can taste paradise on your tongue and rainwater showers down on you from a lightning-bright sky even when you forget to beg for it.

Daddy says rigged-up explosions probably won’t end the drought. I say yeah, but still, we’ve gotta keep going, right? I say, rain or drought, I’m gonna make the best of it.

Everyone in town turns out to watch the miracle unfold, the triumph of man-made science over nature. The rainmaker sets up balloons and glass jars and detonators. Daddy stands with the men, arms crossed. The church ladies congregate on the other side of the road, fighting to smother the blasphemy of their unholy hope. Momma ignores the show, focusing instead on her locket, the one that still holds a wisp of my baby brother’s hair. She only nods when she sees me tucking my tapestry travel bag into the cab of the charlatan’s truck. And though she and I have learned to put our faith in neither gods nor men, we still turn, when the first booms echo across the prairie, we both of us lift our faces to the flash, longing for a sky full of impossibility.

Photo by Dan Page on Unsplash

This story was originally published in 2024 in print, in Issue 5 of Paperbark.