Waltz

When it rains, I am in love. I like it when the water drops get big and heavy like pulpy segments of a pomelo. They crash onto the black pavement of my childhood ranch home, the sweet runny juice spreading across the driveway and leaking into the open carport.

I’d hear the booming rupture of thunder, run out to the yard, and drag the flimsy plastic chair under the carport’s aluminum covering. The chair was old and beaten up from the love of several small children. Parts of the hunter green frame had been sun bleached ashy teal and there was a long crack woven into the hard lattice back. It was a dangerous agreement.

Anyone who sat down had to be careful not to get too comfortable. Slouching or lying back resulted in a certain kind of yellow skin tearing and slicing. Filigree ghosts float between my shoulder blades, now I can never look at a dainty takeout knife with innocence again.

My mother told me when it rains really hard, fish fall from the sky and can be seen dancing in the splashes and small puddles. I didn’t know she was playing a game; the sound for rain in Cantonese is a homophone for the word fish. Sitting in the carport, my eyes glued to the sticky water, I waited for the moment a silvery body would shine its light on me. And when I got tired and there were two red cherries where my elbows had been on thighs, I’d stand up and face the lattice crack, then lift the chair up and waltz with it, hands in arms.

An audience came alive. The dirty shoes caked with mud stomped their feet. The old flat tire bikes honked and whirled. And the fish, the fish sprung up clapping against the pavement in applause as my broken prince and I spun in close breast.

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PS Zhang was born and raised in the American South. Her work can be read in Southern Humanities Review and Zone 3, where she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Further work is forthcoming in New South, where she placed second in their 2021 Prose Contest and Washington Square Review. She is an alumnus of the Iowa’s Writers Workshop Summer Program and a finalist in One Story’s Adina Talve-Goodman Fellowship.