Edges of Rain

A short story about rain, memory, and things that vanish — and return. One of my favorites, even if it never quite found a home in traditional journals. I hope it finds one here."

Some stories don’t fit easily into traditional spaces. They ask to be told in their own time, in their own rain-soaked rhythm. I wrote this a while ago, but it stayed with me. I hope it stays with you too.

Temple Lanterns. Photo by Christopher Ma, 2006, Hsinchu, Taiwan

The annual Plum Rains started right on time, May 3rd. The mist and rain had fallen steadily for days, softening the concrete’s usual hardness, blurring temple roofs into a surreal, pixelated shimmer.

A man in his early thirties quietly rolled the security gate of the cram school down, its clacking echoing through the shiny, rain-soaked streets. He stepped firmly on the lip to align the locks with the frame, inserted a well-worn key, and clicked the door shut.

He sighed and looked out at the street—dark and moody in the late hour. 10:00 p.m. The sun had set hours ago. His last class had ended an hour earlier, but with nothing to do and no one at home, he’d stayed to prepare lessons for tomorrow.

He opened the large black umbrella he’d bought when he moved to Taiwan three years ago, having been warned about the two rainy seasons. Now, the softness of the Plum Rains had become his favorite.

Just past the shuttered shops—roll-down metal grates streaked with rust, hand-painted signs curling at the corners—Simon passed a temple no wider than a single carport, its tiled roof sagging slightly at the center. Red lanterns swayed gently under the eaves, their tassels dark with rain. The walls were tiled in faded ceramic, once bright but now dulled by decades of monsoon soot and incense smoke.

Inside, a single tudi gong—the Earth God—sat squat and smiling, his cheeks glossy from years of offerings. Melted candles leaned toward him like old men telling secrets. A plastic orchid sagged beside a chipped teacup filled with mold-dark rainwater. Smoke stains reached up the back wall like forgotten brushstrokes.

The door was open, but no one was there.

Only the soft hiss of rain dripping from the eaves.

He paused, wondering. So many people came here, looking for something. Guidance. Forgiveness. Companionship.

And just as he paused, he saw her.

She didn’t belong there—not at 10 p.m., not in that moment. She was too still for even this small city, and somehow too dry for the amount of rain. Her hair was long. Black. Edged with something lighter—something that didn’t quite register at first, like the ends had forgotten their color somewhere. It clung to the back of her neck, but not in a way that made it seem wet. Like she had just appeared.

And the long hair didn’t fit her simple clothes: a schoolgirl’s gray skirt—too short to be modest, too old to be current. A skirt from the past. A white blouse, buttoned modestly. Black canvas shoes, worn but in good repair. A school uniform, but long hair. Schools required their female students to wear short hair.

Under the raincoat, in her shirt pocket, a white mouse. Curled like a soft, warm pearl, it sensed everything with a calm stillness. As he watched, she touched the mouse’s head gently with a single finger, as if checking that it was still there. Or real.

She moved toward the temple like she didn’t want to be seen—quickly and with purpose. She moved like someone who could vanish at will. Without warning.

As she moved, she glanced at him and smiled—quietly, coyly. No words.

Simon watched the rain slide from her hair without soaking it—like water refused to claim her.

And beneath the street, unseen in the slow current of runoff and shadow, a snake watched.

II

Simon’s days led into more days, sliding past like droplets on glass at night—blurred by reflection, erased by morning. They didn’t feel lived so much as witnessed, like he was watching someone else’s routine from the corner of a room he couldn’t fully enter.

After seeing the girl, he began staying later at work. Until 10 p.m. most nights. His walk home became ritual. The same route. The same umbrella. The same quiet ache in his chest he hadn’t yet bothered to name.

He had followed her once—into the temple. She hadn’t looked back. The rain had made her hair gleam like black lacquer, and then she was gone. The main altar was lit, incense still curling upward in soft ribbons. The back door, a bright red wooden slab with rusted hinges, stood slightly ajar.

But no one was there.

Now, he sees her often—bent near storm drains or crouched beside doorways, placing sugar cubes—dry and white—into cracks where the rain couldn’t quite reach. Or so he thinks.

Each time, she holds one between her fingers, and before she places it, it vanishes—not dropped, not slipped, but taken. As if something just beneath the surface of the world reaches up with unseen fingers.

Once, he saw her lay a cube on the curved tongue of a stone lion at the base of a shrine. It gleamed there for a moment—sharp-edged, perfect—before the rain melted it in seconds, leaving only a pale, wet mark behind.

The city around them doesn’t notice. Scooters buzz past. Shop signs flicker. A drunk man stumbles through a puddle near the 7-Eleven, muttering to himself. A child’s rain boots slap out a rhythm as she runs to catch her mother’s sleeve.

Simon stands at the edge of it all, watching.

Her smile, when she turns to him, is quiet and unreadable, like she knows he’s there but hasn’t yet decided whether he belongs.

And every now and then, she slips a sugar cube into her coat pocket and whispers:

“乖，妹妹。” Guāi, mèimei. Good girl, little sister.

Her voice is soft and certain, like a bedtime song passed down through generations. The mouse—Xiao Bai—stirs slightly in her pocket, tiny whiskers brushing the edge. Never frightened. Never wet. Just still.

One night, she speaks again.

“The snakes remember better than we do. The lake still carries names under the mud.”

Her Mandarin is strange. Not incorrect—just old. The phrasing too exact, the tones too deliberate. Like language preserved in a lacquered box, rarely opened, untouched by time.

She leads him to a roadside temple nestled between two betel nut stalls. Green fluorescent light from the vendor booths spills across the wet brick, mixing with the red and gold shimmer of the shrine’s carved pillars.

The air smells of soaked ash and old offerings. Wet stone. Burnt orange peels.

A massive cast iron incense pot stands in the center, resting on lion-footed legs. Its rim is crusted with soot, and a charred prayer ribbon flutters against its side. The temple god’s face watches from behind a veil of incense smoke—half-concerned, half-asleep.

She kneels and slips a sugar cube behind the altar, nudging it between the open jaws of a green-and-yellow snake coiled silently behind the pot. Its tongue flicks once. Not in warning.

In recognition.

She stands, unbothered, and reaches into the deep pocket of her pink rain jacket. A single dried plum—dark, wrinkled, almost black—rests in her palm. She tucks it gently into her shirt pocket.

Xiao Bai, curled in the fabric, accepts it without ceremony. The sound of her nibbling is delicate, almost like raindrops on metal.

Next to her, a folded slip of yellow paper. The ink has bled slightly, but one character remains clear:

“雨” Yǔ. Rain.

III

That night, Simon dreamed. A rare dream—remembered—of a stairway sinking into a lake.

Not one he recognized, but familiar somehow—ringed with mist, stones slick with moss, temple bells half-submerged and swaying in water that didn’t ripple. The trees that lined the shore were leafless, their trunks twisted, bark smooth like skin.

He stood at the water’s edge barefoot. His shoes lost somewhere behind him, the soles of his feet cold against wet stone.

The sky was slate. The lake, darker. Black. Still.

From the stillness came a quiet male voice.

Not language, exactly. A feeling.

It said:

“You followed her here. But she was already gone.”

“The lake remembers. Do you?”

The surface shifted.

Shapes moved beneath it—long, slow bodies like ropes made of breath and muscle. Their scales weren’t visible, but he felt them anyway, like memory pressing against his skin.

Then a mouse—Xiao Bai, impossibly large, her fur the color of old paper—stepped onto the water and left no wake.

She turned to look at him.

In the dream, he could read her eyes. Not kind. Not cruel. Ancient.

She sat at the edge of the stairwell and held a small strip of paper in her paws, gnawed and soaked, but the character was still clear:

“雨” Yǔ. Rain.

Then she slipped beneath the surface without a sound.

The lake closed. The stairs vanished.

And Simon woke to the sound of rain against his window—soft, steady, and impossibly precise, as if something outside was tapping a message on the glass.

IV

He moved toward the sound on the glass and looked out.

A single sugar cube sat on the outside sill, recently placed, already dissolving in the rain. Its edges sagged, melting into soft crystal lines that streaked the windowpane.

He stretched, groggy. Looked at the bedside clock.

Right on time.

Enough time to shower, stop for dinner, and walk to the school. He’d slept longer than he wanted, but that was usual. That was life. Sleep. Eat. Teach. And now—look for the mysterious girl.

He heard the tick-tick-tick of the piezo igniter sparking the tankless heater outside the bathroom wall, then the low whoosh as the flame caught. Moments later, warm water spilled over his shoulders, steam curling against the tiled air.

He dressed with quiet precision. Underwear. An oxford shirt. Khaki pants. Black socks. Black leather shoes. And finally—a black belt.

Reaching into his front left pocket to slip in his wallet, he felt paper.

Clean pants. There should be no paper.

He pulled it out. A folded note.

“她是最後的。” Tā shì zuìhòu de. She is the last.

“The last of what?” he thought, already knowing who the note was about.

The girl. With the mouse.

On his walk to school, he passed a makeshift shrine, tucked beneath a corrugated metal overhang along the street. Just joss sticks, half-burned, some fruit in a cracked rice bowl, and three bricks stacked like a crude altar.

Beside it sat an old woman—ancient and beautiful in her way, her skin a folding map of time, her hair stark white and cropped close. Her eyes were dark and sad.

She glanced at him and spoke, voice like paper curling in heat:

“They buried the temple, but not the mouth.

The gods still call for her.”

Simon paused.

The wind shifted. Rain tapped softly on the canopy above.

He turned the corner.

Then glanced back.

The woman was gone. So was the shrine.

As if they had never been there at all.

That night, he dreamed again.

The same dream.

Stone steps vanishing into a lake.

Shapes moving under the surface.

And the mouse voice, calling his name in tones he could feel in his spine.

Then he woke up.

Or thought he did.

Because Xiao Bai was there.

On the table.

Silent.

Still.

Not trembling or sniffing. Just watching.

She turned once in a slow circle, then padded across the wood. From beneath her, she left behind something strange.

A rolled slip of snakeskin. Dry. Pale. Almost translucent.

He picked it up, unrolled it gently.

Inside, one character:

“去” Qù. Go.

V

He fell back asleep. Or maybe he had dreamed it all.

And woke the next day. At the same time.

He showered—again, the tick-tick-tick of the igniter, the low whoosh as the flame caught. Warm water. Caressing him. Holding him in place a little longer than he meant to stay.

He dressed methodically. The same routine. Shirt, pants, belt, socks. A quiet armor.

He reached into his pocket. No paper.

He left his apartment, locking the steel door. Then pulled the security gate closed and turned the key three times, as always, to be sure. The metal clinked sharply in the stillness.

He walked down the narrow stairwell, the concrete slick with humidity.

And there she was.

Standing in the rain.

Her plaid schoolgirl skirt. Black shoes. White blouse. As always. The pink raincoat. The dry, glossy black hair. Her hair was never wet.

She smiled sweetly and said, simply: “Come.”

And he did.

He followed her, remembering Xiao Bai’s message on snakeskin.

She moved ahead of him, hair swinging gently with her stride. She didn’t speak. Not yet. But she looked back at him sometimes, with a tilt of her head—not curious, but knowing. As if she already understood something he hadn’t even thought to ask.

They left the city behind. She led him up a narrow, overgrown path, one that seemed to disappear the moment they stepped onto it.

The path narrowed as it rose from the edge of town, hemmed in by thickets of elephant grass and low, tangled guava trees, their waxy leaves beaded with rain. Wild ginger pushed up from the soil in tight, leafy spirals, and every crushed stem released a sharp, peppery sweetness into the air.

The scent was thick, almost heavy enough to taste—mud and wet stone, rotting wood, the faint bitterness of lichen and moss, and underneath it all, the fermented tang of fallen fruit, softening and collapsing into the earth.

Sometimes, a breath of iron rose from deeper puddles—metallic and clean—followed by the warm exhale of compost and leaf mulch that had soaked too long in the hillside’s lungs.

Every few steps, the wind shifted just enough to carry a thread of temple smoke from far below—a phantom whiff of burnt sandalwood, or the ghost of someone else’s incense still lingering between rains.

Simon caught himself breathing through his mouth without meaning to.

It was the smell of a place not meant to be found. Not quite wild. Not quite forgotten. But claimed by something older than memory, and damp enough to keep that memory alive.

The rain began to fall harder.

They started to descend toward a small lake, hidden by mist and surrounded by forgotten shrines, their stone rooftops bowed under moss and time.

And finally, she spoke.

“Before the city reached this far, before the gods were paved over and stacked in concrete walls, there was a lake. And the lake had a name. Not the kind written on maps—but the kind that disappears when no one says it anymore.

The lake had a keeper. A king. He wasn’t like people think—no crown, no robe. Just coils and silence. A hundred-pacer, gold and green. Scales like water held in moonlight. He could take a man’s shape, when he wanted. Or speak through dreams, if they listened.

And once, long ago, he chose me.

I was born in a village that doesn’t exist anymore. It was washed away—not by rain, but by forgetting. My mother said I was marked. That I looked too long at water. That snakes followed me in spring. So when he came—slipping through the mist with eyes like smoke—I already knew his name.

He asked for a bride. Not with words. With stillness.

I said yes.

And they tried to stop me. They tried to bury the lake. To seal the shrines. But that doesn’t work. Not with gods who remember their shape.

So I left. I walked into the water.

But you can’t live in memory. Not forever. Even gods grow lonely when no one believes in them.

So I returned. Small enough to fit between storm grates. Light enough to ride on mist. Just long enough to remember what I was.

But the shrines are all broken now. The altars are full of mildew. And he—he sleeps deeper every year.

I am the last offering. The last name.

And I came to give it back.”

They arrived at the edge of the lake. The air was cold, misted. The water lay flat and pale—the way steel might look if it forgot how to shine.

The Plum Rain fell around them in fine, silver lines.

Simon reached instinctively for his umbrella—then realized he hadn’t brought it.

And yet he was dry.

His hair. His shirt.

He raised his hand to touch his head.

Dry.

Just like hers always was.

Xiao Bai slipped from her pocket and scurried down her arm, pausing at her wrist, then leaping lightly into the water.

The surface did not ripple.

Then Lanying stepped in.

The water rose to her ankles. Her knees. Her waist.

She turned to him. Her face was calm.

And she said:

“Tell them I kept the promise.”

Then she stepped deeper.

And she was gone.

Only a single ripple remained—soft, widening.

And just beneath the surface, the golden eye of a massive snake opened briefly.

And then closed.

VI

Simon carefully retraced his steps.

He recalled her story, now understanding the quiet miracle of how she remained dry in the rain. As he walked, he noticed he still was too—his skin untouched, his hair dry.

But as he edged closer to home, toward the apartment and the umbrella he’d forgotten, the rain began to penetrate. Lightly at first. A dampness creeping through his sleeves. A drop sliding down his temple.

By the time he reached the gate, the rain was soaking through his shirt. His hair clung to his forehead.

He ran up the stairs, damp now, and grabbed his umbrella. Then rushed to class. Diligent. Precise.

A few days later, he returned to the shrine.

A soft voice—almost silent—urged him inward. Toward the back corner. Beside the red wooden door.

And in that corner, beneath layers of ash and forgotten incense, he found a small shrine—its wood blackened, its base cracked. Behind the half-burned offerings stood a spirit tablet, rimmed once in gold, now dulled and flaking.

He leaned closer.

Barely visible on the tablet:

“瑩雨” Yíng Yǔ.

And he knows.

Ying—from her name. Yǔ—rain.

He paused. Then turned back to the temple counter and made a quiet donation.

He received three sticks of incense. Carefully lit them. Watched the flame rise and vanish into curl.

He placed them in the censer in front of her tablet. Gently. Precisely.

And then he left.

Outside, the rain paused.

A break in the clouds allowed a single sunbeam to slip through, lighting the place where he had first seen her—just past the rusted shutters, beside the sagging roofline, beneath the swaying red lanterns.

And there she was.

Just for a moment.

She nodded once.

Smiled.

And vanished.