August 2055.

She stepped out into the lightless wet day carrying her bag and where the sun stood firm in the east she could see the distant fragments of the pink morning laying like spilled blood against the cusp of the horizon. A cold wind had kicked up the dirt from the streets and the loam fell like ash between the herringbone. She turned and waited. Irene came out wearing her old coat. It was a coat she had bought years ago and it clung to her thin frame like a blanket and with her grey hair tied back she looked leptosomic and not unlike the crone of some old fable fashioned into some semblance of life, or living. She smiled and Seulgi smiled back. ‘Come on,’ she said, holding her arm out.

In the town square they said good morning to the kids as they passed on their bikes and the woman that worked at the overlook café. They sat by the window and bought coffee and watched the morning pass. It had rained in the night and in the smeared and rainswept frame of the window they saw the world all bent out of shape and swollen and crudely leaking myriad colour like a diorama. In the sunblackened street small seagulls came pecking for food and craning their necks against the cold blue hue of the world and hollering silent as if in quiet or mimic lamentation of the very nature of the day and then no soon after they were gone. The boys from down the avenue came and leaned their bikes against the front of the supermarket across the street and as they wobbled in the afterglow of the rain Seulgi and Irene watched them like onlookers at some wild and curious zoo.

‘It looks like it’s going to rain again,’ Irene said.

‘You think?’

‘I heard somewhere if it rains in the morning in august, it’ll rain again in the evening.’

‘Where did you hear that?’

Irene sipped her coffee with a grimace. ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

‘I don’t remember it ever doing that before. Careful, it’ll burn you.’

‘I’m okay.’

‘It’s hot.’

‘I’ll live. It was just something I heard anyway. I don’t know where.’

‘I don’t remember it being a pattern.’

‘Well.’

‘Well.’

‘Well maybe it isn’t.’

Seulgi looked out to the sky. ‘Maybe it is,’ she said. ‘Maybe.’

‘I was just thinking.’

‘About what?’

‘About this other thing I heard a while back. I don’t know where. It was about how you can always tell a lot about a person from how they react to the weather. How someone behaves when it rains, when it’s sunny. When there’s storms brewing. Whether they sit inside or hide away or what have you. Like those kids over there. Look at them.’

‘Put that cup down. You’ll burn yourself.’

‘I’m not an old woman.’

‘Still.’

Irene set the cup down. ‘Look,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘See them? Just enjoying the day. Just relishing it. Straight after the rain, they’re out there playing. On their bikes. Seeing the world for what it is. You can tell a lot about a person from that. From people.’

‘I think they’re just kids.’

‘Really?’

‘What?’

‘Do you really think just that?’

Seulgi looked at her. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Maybe I do.’

‘I thought you’d have more insight than that.’

‘Why? Because of who I am?’

‘Because of what you’ve been through.’

‘Not everything. I don’t know everything.’

‘That’s true.’

Seulgi drank her coffee. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It might mean something. It probably does.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Why’d you say that?’

‘Well. You said it, didn’t you? So why do you think it?’

‘I asked you first.’

‘No. Go on.’

Irene shrugged. She had one finger on the rim of her cup and she smiled and lifted and drank again and then she said, ‘I’m just rambling. Like I always do. What about you?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Seulgi. ‘I just think maybe everything in the world has got some meaning to it. I think it must do.’

‘Everything’s got some meaning.’

‘Yeah. Doesn’t matter how small. Or whether you know it or not. Everything’s got reason or rhyme to it. Everything happens for something.’

‘Maybe you’re right.’

Seulgi smiled a hollow smile, tired eyes. ‘Maybe I am,’ she said.

*  *  *

She waited on the bench for Irene to come back from the toilet and they went together pushing the trolley down the aisles, selecting out whatever they felt like slowly, leisurely. It was a quiet day, quiet atmosphere. Empty in the long grocery lanes and in between. Seulgi pushed while Irene ahead searched the shelves. She was older now, and grey, and she slumped ever so slightly when she walked, and her shoulders held in them little of the same rigid pride of her youth, and her skin where visible at her nape above the wide puffer hood of her coat was tanned and weatherworn and aged, but she was still Irene. She was still Seulgi’s Irene. She turned around and smiled and Seulgi smiled back. Couldn’t help it.

When they were finished they paid at the counter and as the cashier rang their bags Irene stopped. Seulgi looked up at her.

‘What?’ she said.

‘I forgot something.’

‘What?’

‘Milk. We didn’t get any milk.’

She made her way down the aisles and came back with two cartons of milk and paid for them and by the exit she stopped again and turned to look at Seulgi but Seulgi would not look back at her. As if she couldn’t. And there was something in those eyes whether sadness or despair or some hollow and inexplicable tragedy that set Irene on edge. ‘What?’ she said. ‘What is it?’

To that Seulgi made no response. They walked. Seulgi carried most of the bags. In the afternoon no sun had come up and the cold white shell of the day stood in silent and quaking desolation to the west of the barren day and the clouds where they lay in the black ceiling of the world looked fit to rain.

‘Looks like a storm’s coming,’ Irene said.

‘Yeah.’

‘I told you so.’

‘You did.’

‘Are you okay?’

‘I’m fine,’ Seulgi said.

‘Seulgi.’

‘I’m fine. Come on. Before it rains.’

They came out beyond the tangle of town and in silence they walked up through the hills towards the peak overlooking the waterfront where it met the beach. They stopped there for a moment and there were no cars on the road behind them and all was very quiet and in that great moment of silence the last sundried light glimmered pale and empty from the grey maw of the universe like a scene fathomed out of some hellish antiquity. They set the grocery bags down and stood there with their hands in the pocket in the cold and listening for any sound whether bird or car or man but there was nothing save the sea and after a while they took up their things and went home.

When they were inside and warm and the cupboards full Irene sat at the table and watched Seulgi while she prepared them dinner and she did not speak at all. Seulgi would not look at her. Perhaps at some point in the last hour or two since that parting however momentary at the supermarket she had been crying and perhaps Irene had not noticed that and the very notion of such a thing scared her slightly, because never before had she missed something like that, never before in her younger years would she fail to see that very familiar pain in Seulgi’s eyes, the way she remained so terribly quiet as if in martyrdom to some strangled and unstoppable torment writhing inside of her. When they were sat they ate and they ate without saying anything. By the time they finished it had begun to rain. They watched it fall against the conservatory doors like slow cells.

‘Told you,’ Irene said. ‘It means something. I know it.’

‘I never said you didn’t.’

‘Looks like it’ll last all night. Maybe until tomorrow.’

‘Yeah. Probably. You finished?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I’ll wash up.’

‘Now?’

‘Why not?’

Seulgi had already taken both plates and stacked them and she took the coffeecups and with all the cutlery moved away to the sink as if desperate. Irene watched her. She wiped the last of the coleslaw and the chips into the bin and soaped and cleaned the plates and rinsed the cups and left the cutlery to soak in the bowl and when she was finished Irene called to her. At first she refused to move. Or look anywhere but out the window, at the slow and mad decline of the reckless day.

‘Seulgi.’

‘Yeah.’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Seulgi.’

Seulgi turned to her. If she had not been crying before she was now, if only in passing. ‘What’s wrong?’ Irene said.

‘It’s nothing.’

‘Back there. When we were shopping. What happened?’

For a long time she thought Seulgi would not answer but she did. ‘The cashier,’ she said.

‘What about her?’

‘She said it was nice to see you out shopping with me.’

‘What’s wrong with that?’

‘She thought you were my mother.’

*  *  *

In the dim grey light she awoke to the wail of sirens somewhere in the distance and it was a long time before she could sleep again. Sometime later before dawn broke she awoke for a second time and knowing she could not sleep again she sat there in bed with her palms pressed to her eyes listening to the staccato of rain against the window as if it were her own racing heartbeat. It was cold and it had not stopped raining at all through the night. She opened the bedside drawer and took out the book there and put it back again and sat for a while not really knowing what she was doing. It was hard to see much of anything in the darkness and through the curtains there was no sign of light or morning for another hour at least.

She turned and looked to Irene. Where she lay the pillows sank in a small impression around her thin and sallow frame and she hummed quietly in her sleep and her chest rose and fell in some inordinate and clumsy rhythm. She had her hands tucked neatly under her head and she did not roll about and her hair splayed across the side of the pillow like grey water running from her scalp. She looked very much at peace there, very much her own person. A small and placid smile on her dry lips. Every now and then she would sigh, perhaps with content, as if satisfied with her herself or something containing in her dreams a similar nature or conclusion. Maybe she was thinking of Seulgi. Or maybe not.

Seulgi watched her for a long time. Soon it was almost light. She was so tender, so vulnerable. In her sleep she looked every minute her age and at sixty-four it hurt Seulgi to think of all she was and all she had become and what was yet to come and so she didn’t think on it much at all. That had become almost a pact between them. To mention little of the future or the past beyond happy recollection of times spent well together, of better and brighter days. Where the sun had no grey and there was no rain in autumn or winter, no rain at all. She studied the wrinkles on the back of Irene’s pale and small hands and then in the thin newly born light held up her own, thin and smooth and young and with no wrinkles at all. As they had always been. She ran a hand across her face, her nose, her ears, along her chest, and then the other. It was all smooth, all strong and young and healthy. And there was Irene and she was none of those things but she was strong. She was oh so very strong. She would never let that smile fade because there was no dormancy to her happiness, not now and not ever, and she hoped Seulgi understood that, hoped she even could. Because counter to that was a truth both devastating and terrible in its finality, and that was almost unbearable.

She pushed back the covers and rose shivering in the cold and made her way quietly downstairs and into the livingroom. She pulled on her slippers and drew back the curtains and Irene slept on. A cold sun was beginning to stir in the east. She unlocked the window door and stepped out onto the balcony and into the bitter cold and there she stood for a long time wincing against the black wet husk of the wretched day and as the wind blew isolate and silent and the rain fell against her timeless figure she held out her hands as if in auguring and closed her eyes and prayed to any who would listen for some reprieve, if only for a day, just for a change. Just for something different. To take this away from me. To make it all go away. But only the sun could hear her and in its response it turned its face from her and cast her out and so for the rest of the morning there she stood, cold and wet, alone and afraid, crying and begging and pleading with the world for something that could never happen, for something that could never change.