MENTORSHIP RECIPIENT

Mentor Commentary:
Isaiah Hunt

Recipient Reflection: Lucy Rees

Mama Made the Rain

Fiction by Lucy Rees

“I don’t know how to make it stop,” Mama says, gazing at the drizzle and mist outside, and I
swear a smile flickers across her lips. Our feet are soaked and sloshing. I step over the puddles,
avoid her gaze, and start to make my way to the car. The storm she’s created so that she can save
me from it.

​I can feel she wants to yank me, to pluck me like bellybutton lint and deposit me somewhere I
won’t be able to move. I am old enough now where she cannot physically stop me from leaving
the house, but young enough that she still has a barometer for my exact location, which corner of
town I might nestle in, which damp booths I might kiss in under flickering fluorescence. I’m not
sure what corners she’s imagining because there are really no corners in Boothbay Harbor. There
is the Ice Cream Hut, and there is no one that I am kissing.

“Is Becca coming with you tonight?”

“No Mama, just me. Becca has an English paper.”

“Well maybe you should also be working on your English paper.”

“I don’t have an English paper. I am going on a drive. I will be fine.”

Mama warns me of the roads being slick. That a fog might be coming in. Gusts from the west
will pick up. It will begin around 8pm, she says. She can feel it. Make sure the car lights are on. I
remind her that I have no proclivity to drive at night with my lights off. I remind her that I am a
human capable of basic discernment. She worries about the weather anyway.

It’s been this way forever. My resentment curdles immediately to guilt so I stick my arms out,
let her bundle me in my weatherproof garb like a swaddle. Our eyes lock in swirling confusion.
Because I want to drive, I want out, out, out, and Mama wants insides, wants her favorite chair
each morning, rubbing lotion on her collarbones, that skin that’s never seen the sun. She smacks
her lips against an evening mug of ground instant coffee as though it’s the most profound taste to hit her lips and offers me ruby red grapefruit juice that I refuse.

“Are you sure Becca won’t come with you?” A last ditch effort.

“I am sure Mama.” The resigned, same song and dance.

I look back at her and she really is beautiful in her fear. It does wonders for the dew on her
skin. She’s spotless, untouched by eyes and hands and weather. My classmates have never seen
her, and they never will. I don’t think they notice. She sinks into the leather, hair pin-curled,
cherry red nails, feet bare, tucked like bunnies under her bum, as she calls it. I committed the
cardinal sin of repeating the word during a school presentation, only to learn that no one else has
ever called it that in the history of time. I was called a combination of goodie goodie and eighty
nine year old woman, bottled up into the fact that I knew nothing and they knew everything. I
was a blank slate in a sad way, untouched like new ice skates on your top closet shelf.

Never again. Now, I commit tiny crimes each day, filth to fog the glass, undetectable things
alone but cumulatively I hope they make the house untenable. I leave my period pads open,
unwrapped in the wicker wastebasket, don’t fold them neatly to spare any disgust. It does
nothing. Nothing makes her want fresh air, even when little gnats commune in the trash around
my rotting scent. I watch Cassidy and Taylor in calculus, the flippy thing they do with their hair,
the way boys' eyes do that sugary glaze thing when they look at them and I document it. I
document it all. I listen to the specific smacking of bubblegum against molars, measure the
specific hunch of boredom at our wooden slab desks. I fill in their collective words like Mad
Libs. Clinique__Face cream. College applications?? Swimmer’s body__Pete’s! Smirnoff. Smirnoff? School is my respite, my reprieve from Mama, but I’m not sure what I’m actually
getting out of that either.

On my drive, the road winds into town, and the tourists must be thanking their lucky stars that
they caught the sun of Boothbay before Mama’s mind started controlling the weather. I am
starting to really believe it. I don’t even know if she fully believes it yet, if she senses something
new and sinister, because, for her, she thinks: of course this is happening. As I already knew it
would. I traverse this road every day and I still get a shiver down my spine at the signs of dead
militia, dead coast guards, dead airforce pilots. Boothbay Harbor Salutes! I try not to see my
own face on the signs and pass mini golfers tapping their sticks to turf, wanting to make
something bend. Wanting to make something move. That’s all it ever is, isn’t it? Mama wants the
weather to be bad. Mama wants the earth to move, to confirm that she was right: the Earth
moves, and therefore we shouldn’t.

I prefer to drive alone, but when Becca comes on my drives, we go to the Ice Cream Hut. She
gets a Big Chill with vanilla and peanut butter cups. I steadfastly lie to her. I lie so beautifully
that my smile splits at the seams, that I almost believe it all.

Becca is four years younger than me. We met this year because I am a peer leader of her gym
class. She called me Phoebe but pronounced it like Puh-heebee and that was all it took to be
friends. Younger friends suited me, since I had no other friends to speak of and zero life
experience. I don’t think she had many friends either, and I had the added cool factor of age. I
like the feeling of being looked up to. It makes me feel like a camp counselor, like she’s
watching me take my hair out of a bun and put it back up in a bun again.

I don’t think I’ve ever asked her a question about her life because I’m so desperate to
fabricate the possibilities of my own. I don’t tell her about Mama, about my rotting period pads,
about my stale house. About Uncle in the basement. With Becca I am mysterious. With Becca I
can be porous, I can notice things without worrying about someone noticing me noticing. Each
night I hit the pillow with a very specific worry in the back of my head that one day, someone at
school will tell her who I am outside of that car.

But tonight, I am on my own. Becca has a family dinner. I can’t grasp the concept, though I
know it’s universal. The roads are barely slick; my tires grip the pavement as they are meant to.
The sun is near setting and the Maine air is crisp, the way Maine air is always crisp even with an
errant fog, even when the heavens open. It is a universal truth of Maine, I think, buckling my
seatbelt, just as it seems universal for parents to worry about the weather, minds clawing at
control over the least controllable thing we know.




The next day at school, Pete Talbot snatches my notebook just as I’m scribbling the anecdote
Cassidy regales about her Mama. He swings it in the air like a pair of bloody underwear.

“Look, she looks like she’s gonna be sick.”

“She’s gonna froth at the mouth!”

“She’s rabid, I swear.”

“She can’t be rabid if she’s never outside. What could bite her?”

“Who knows what’s going on in there.”

Mrs. Thompson finally snatches my notebook, the beaded chain of her glasses jangling
against Pete’s huffed breath and pit stains. She keeps me after class. I am frozen and very still.
She asks if things are okay at home, if there’s anything I’m worried about. If I’m having trouble
getting to school in the rain. I say everything is fine and scan the halls for Becca.

“Why did they call you rabid?” Becca asks only ten minutes later. The rumor mill surpasses
all bounds of time and age.

“Because I was writing everything down,” I say as callously as I can cultivate.

“That makes no sense,” she says. She does the flippy thing with her hair. “Did something bite
you? I don’t get it.”

“Nothing bit me,” I say. “But sometimes I wish it would.”

“Why do you write everything down?” She asks me now for the first time. I am scooped out.
This only works when no one looks directly at me.

I truthfully don’t remember when I started writing everything down, probably out of boredom,
melodramatic desire, language for my sequestered heart. My at-home entries could probably be
reported to child services if found. 1PM: We still haven’t left. 2PM: Mama sings of the indoors,
that we are lucky her brother lives with us, doesn’t disturb us, that we don’t speak of the other
siblings who don’t. I think one of them is a storm chaser. 2:30 PM: ruby red grapefruit. 3PM:
Becca has a family dinner again. 4PM: Can I get bedsores from too much time lying down? It’s
raining a lot lately. How can I become a storm chaser?

I write down that the girls’ Mamas recommended drugstore mascara brands that don’t clump.
They take them to buy tampons and shimmering body lotion that smells chemically peachy. They
find bras together, ones that won’t show straps under their homecoming dresses, ones that clip on the side or front, and their Mamas clasp them for them, their Mamas cock their heads and see
how well they fit, their Mamas acknowledging, therefore, the circle of life. The life I could live
is on the other side of that crucial bra. And then they have mall-ish strawberry banana smoothies
made by a teen with cystic acne and floopy hair, a trip outside of Portland, and they fight the
whole car ride home. Cassidy didn’t call her Grandmother. Taylor won’t tell her Mama who she’s
texting. Mama is never mad unless I go out in the weather. There’s no time for me to do anything
else, no chance for anger that would at least feel like something.

How much I have learned. But I realize now that I can’t document so lackadaisically. I need to
appear careless. I am not watching you! I have no reason to take your life and try it on!

Watching Becca, Cassidy, Pete, I flip a new page to list how I can seem forgetful, like I
couldn’t possibly be paying attention. I start wearing mascara, contraband from the discarded
trash of the women’s bathroom, but I only put it on one eye. I document in private now, reciting
the words in my head until I can close a stall door to write in peace.

My closed stall door consensus: no one else’s Mama is an inside Mama. No other Mama lives
like my Mama, with her merry-go-round days, crinkling crosswords between her thumbs,
sticking to her cold sweat and talcum powder, chomping bubblegum. No other household has
Uncle in the basement, covered in woodshavings, leaving tangerine peels on the counter. Staying
inside just like Mama. Breathing in and out, chewing, swallowing. They live at half mast. They
are content. They don’t seem to consider that half mast is a mourn for the dead. They don’t seem
to run from the hours of the day, hours that choke me. I can’t believe how many of them there
are. I can’t believe it’s not negotiable.




And so unfurls my routine: tonight, again, telling Mama I’m going out, Mama’s face
contorting, Mama’s recounting of the upcoming weather events that will hinder my drive or
make me crash the car. The fog will be at 8pm tonight, though it didn’t happen last night, I do
not say. The fog will follow. Remember? I don’t know how to make it stop. It’s not safe. I won’t
be able to see. Me, reassuring, I will be fine, no, Becca isn’t coming with me. Me, fracturing her
heart each day. Me, causing her duress, at the reward of my own relief.

Now: the night is crisp, the air is clear, the rain is tame. I sense no such mysterious fog with
low visibility. Fog from where? For who? The clouds won’t bend to Mama’s thoughts, I want to
tell her, though I’m not sure I believe it. The rain, it does seemingly appear. It’s appeared a lot
lately.

I drive past the signs again, the dead militia, and shudder. They are everywhere, they are all
over town, memorialized by Boothbay as if to announce ourselves as the creepiest town on the
planet, as if me having reclused family members year round in a tourist town does anything to
help the case. This scares me more than the weather, the signs of dead men, smiling down on
tourists, of forced patriotism with a smile, a hand pushing a head under water in the name of
play. When the scariest people laugh when they’re angry, undereye twitching, all beneath the
broad strokes of an idyllic bayside scene.

Mama doesn’t mind the signs. Mama minds the weather.

I see it again, my own face on every sign, the inscription of the year I was born and the year I
died, the movie sailing through my head in a gust of thought. Boothbay wouldn’t remember me.
I don’t want it to remember. I want no association with its memory, no association with much at
all. All Mama does is make me associate. Words I use: embarrassing at school. Diseased.
Documenting: in secret. Drives: danger. Outside: unsafe. Weather: imminent.
Me: resisting.

Something stirs. My tongue clicks in my cheek without permission. It’s the clouds, the fact
that they’ve sprouted out of seemingly nowhere, that they’re so dark I might need sunglasses, the kind of dark that ends up with a glare, too much to look directly at, because who can stare right into the face of darkness? Whose eyes could possibly adjust?

The car clock strikes 8:01, which I know means 8:00 on the dot because my car clock is one
minute off and I refuse to change it, another small but mighty rebellion. I turn the car around just
as the rain pelts, just as the droplets turn to hornets against my windshield. There’s fog too. There is somehow fog in the middle of pounding rain. The roads are slick. From one moment to the next, Mama’s worries have materialized before me. I fumble for the windshield wipers. I can’t
see a thing. Suddenly, the wheels squeal against the road and before I can take a breath, I’m
spinning, hydroplaning over the lane-lines, stomach plunging, slipping and sliding in sloppy
figure eights until the car somehow rights itself, grabs the pavement. I heave, time stretching and
constricting in both eons and nanoseconds. The only word on my lips: Mama.

Mama is at the door when I run through, drenched. “You were right, Mama,” I say, throwing
her a bone. I so rarely tell her she’s right, so rarely feed the beast. She ushers me in as if I was
left on her doorstep, nude and shivering in a basket with no note. She draws a bath and pours the
special ylang ylang salts. Mama cultivates cozy, the drippy candles along my bath, the squatty
ones whose wax reshapes itself with each burn. I dip into the heat in the way we dive into any
pleasure, timidly and then full throttle.

I stay damp long after my bath, and I stay caught in the middle of something, of wet weather
and dry, of clear skies and slick roads. Of my desire to quell Mama’s worries and the knowledge
that they came true, I suppose. But just this once, I remind Mama as she murmurs, as her voice
jabbers on a loop that she was right, that the roads were slick, that I shouldn’t have gone on my
drive. “Look what could have happened.”

“Look what didn’t happen.”




I know Mama’s worries are a self fulfilling prophecy, but I’m starting to know it too much.
Each morning, I wake to what she said was going to happen. I don’t know how to make it stop.
Bitterness grows in the back of my throat, my rebellion losing credibility by the second as the
pounding on the roof grows by the hour.

Rain pelts in torrents. We even have hail, golfballs, need to pull the car in the garage, then the
hail becomes melons, just as Mama said. We are inside so much. The basement carpet is getting
soggy, Uncle yells from below. Mama is so happy, her thoughts confirmed and materialized. See,
she says. See.

Becca hasn’t come to school in days. The girls at school start to talk.

“Is the world ending?”

“I need to like, have a word with God.”

“It keeps fucking ruining my hair. There’s no point in straightening it anymore.”

I don’t know if I’m desperate to protect Mama or desperate to expose her. Would they even
believe me?

The more Mama thinks, the more she tries to one up her thoughts. The universe calls her
bluff. It doles out hurricane force winds, winter storms as December hurdles closer. We become
deeper inside people. School is canceled. I can’t go on my drives. Six thousand of us in
Boothbay year round, and we don’t see each other. Six thousand candles lit through drapes,
showing signs of life. The weather is a witch’s finger, long and knobby, tapping on our windows
until they break.

The power goes to Mama’s head. She keeps regenerating worry, producing weather. I wish
she’d shed her weather worries with her power. Use her power to make the sun shine down.

She’s not sure it works this way, she says, without trying and testing to see.

Our basement has flooded and Uncle comes upstairs. Mama doesn’t seem to worry that the
house could be swept away. Is this not enough to make you stop? I do not say. We huddle on the
couch together, listening to the boom of thunder, the pelting against our windows, each droplet a
fang. I’ve never sat this close to Uncle before. His undereyes sag yet his pupils scurry back and
forth like a mouse, taking in the newness of the upstairs, lips puckering like citrus skin. He
pretzels his legs underneath him to keep his feet off the ground and he feels simultaneously so
young and so old, like we’re playing a game of lava, a game where our feet can’t touch the
ground, a game he is much too old to be playing still.

I can’t document anyone else so I document Uncle and Mama. Realize how little I know,
suturing the holes. The freckle on the top of her hand that I’ve never noticed, tucked in wrinkled
skin. The lights out behind her eyes. How long have her eyes looked like that? So lifeless? Mama
speaks of when Uncle was small, twinkling as she looks at him, how he sailed through the bay.
He sailed? I ask. I can’t imagine people with my blood in the face of such thrill, by choice. He
was the best sailor in all of Maine. She smiles. Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning.

Has that been it? Has there been a red sky every morning? The gnawing, the kite string
tickling the back of my neck? Is that the answer? I write it down, over and over like I’m on a
mandate to memorize the looping, twisting letters, to brand it into my skull. Mama in her robe,
tucked bunny feet, nails clacking her juice glass. Her mind starts glitching around the edges, the
veil between private thought and spoken word blurring from our isolation.

“My Mama never let me go out,” she mumbles, trailing off. Uncle nods along. I want to ask
more, but the faucet tap is off. The moment has passed like a bout of weather. I imagine slippery
roads and death like it’s a cold we can catch.

My number somehow makes it into a text chain of the local Boothbay girls. I assume they are
so desperate for connection that they cast a wide net and grab me unintentionally. I don't
complain. I am anointed, ready to be swept into whatever wriggling net I can, peekytoe crab and Maine lobster. Hook me through the throat.

The texts are sputtering and chaotic, they are inner thoughts spoken in a way I’ve never
spoken before. The texts are more than their whispers and complaints at school, they are inside
thoughts that make it out, a desperate purge, incantory prayers. I wonder if this is belonging.

I’m going fucking crazy

This is apocalyptic. Apocalypse? Am I spelling right? I can’t think anymore….

What could be causing this?

My mom is driving me crazy

She’s making me polish silver. We don’t use silver

Have ur basements flooded too??

Found some gin bless

My mom is so bored she went through my stuff and found condoms

This is too much time with my family they are driving me insane

I miss Pete. Do you think he’s thinking about me? Should I text him?

Do you think a tree will fall on Mr. Patterson’s house

Should I text Pete???

Why is this happening?

I type so many things I delete, but all I can think is My mama made this rain.
The peek through these windows is like sweet tea in my veins. Condom searching Mamas.
Cassidy’s Mama, too acquainted with her wine collection through the storms. Mamas, reading
these texts. Their Mamas worry so differently, but what bends my brain is that it seems to be
worry nonetheless.

Becca texts me separately. I’m not sure if she’s been seeing these messages.
How have you been doing this? Living like this this whole time? I’m going crazy.
My body glitches, a profound freeze before it finds footing again. I pretend I don’t know what
she means, but it doesn’t work. It isn’t subtle. She’s seen me, my lies have not worked. I just
hope you can get out and go to college soon, she says.

Our home grows smaller by the second from the rain, the flood. The couch is the only dry
ground. We huddle on the cushions, Mama’s wingspan drawing us closer. The windowpanes
shudder from the booms. We lose items left and right. I salvage only my notebook.
We go on like this, our own units, those tucked bunnies. Mama’s worries are paramount to me
but not transferable. Ours go all the way up my family tree, but it doesn’t go sideways. Not to
Cassidy, not to Taylor, not to Becca, Becca with the luxury of thinking about college, me with
the world confined to this couch. We are a lightning rod to the sky, catching all possible weather.




Mama is starting to not like being right. I wonder if this is growth. I wonder if we don’t
actually want the things that we worry about to happen, after all.

“I don’t know how to make it stop,” Mama finally admits, near tears. She’s not smiling
anymore. Suddenly, Mama’s mouth is a river, tongue exposed, dam disintegrated. “My Great
Grandmama. Your great great. So many greats, isn’t it? She died, on the road, in the storm. Her
daughter, my grandmama, was waiting for her to come home and she never did. Swore that she’d
never again be stupid, that being swept up in an event was a choice. No drives. No more boat.
We don’t go out in the weather.”

I let her unspool. “We don’t—” she chokes, and I can finally grasp at something, finally an
answer, the kite tail that’s tickled the back of my neck my entire life, finally something I can
wrap fingers around, can trace up, up, up to the sharp diagonals of origin, the underbelly, sharp
and real and assertive but also wafer thin in my palms.

Mama’s breath loosens and her mouth relaxes and the water level dips, near imperceptible but
I notice. I open my phone to type back to Becca. I have words to say to now. I don’t know how
you do this, sure, but at least I now know why. I look to Mama, the new look in her eyes. A
cautionary tale, or a rubric? A blueprint, or a what-not-to-do? I intend to ask. I want to ask them
all. Why am I doing this? What should I do instead? I write so much, surely I have material to
string a college essay together. A narration. A wind in my sail.

Lucy Rees

Lucy Rees is a writer living in Chicago. Her work appears in The Chicago Review of Books, HAD, and Flash Fiction Magazine. She was a 2024 Semi Finalist in American Short Fiction's Halifax Ranch Short Fiction Prize, and she is on the Associate Board of Story Studio Chicago. Find her at lucymrees.com.