Like a piercing static, the rain of pebbles storms atop our roof. When I was younger, the pebble rain would send jolting shivers from my ears down to my spine, and around my entire body. I would recede into some secluded spot in our house, where only a murmur of the rain could reach, and cover my ears and close my eyes, till the pebble rain would stop. Now that I am older, I can no longer hide. I must pretend that it isn’t there, like the grown-ups do, receding only inside my mind; the bellowing ache of fear still reaches from within my core.

Everything around us has these covers, to stop damage from the pebble rain. I helped put one up once, for the swings in our garden. We’re not rich, so we settle for a cover of thin metal, that forbids the little rocks from breaking through, though not without sustaining damage to its surface in the process. It works well and lasts a long time, but the horrid noise it makes, when the pebbles strike the surface of the metal; like a bullet that send electrical shocks wherever it strikes, a shock that permeates just the surface and carries on through to my mind, where it echoes long after the pebble rain has stopped. It paralyses me, but we must move on. The little ones loved the swings, and used them till they broke.

One evening, the pebbles were falling with an especially violent force. I felt from their strikes that they had a vendetta, like they were after someone, and would not cease their ruckus till they claimed them. I tried to keep their noise out, cover my ears for at least a little peace, but where their sound did not reach, my skin heard them well, and the pain persisted. As I passed from the living room to the kitchen, I walked by the front door of the house, where beyond anything I could explain, I swore the rattling cacophony spoke to me.

‘Let me in!’ it screamed, in a shrill, tired voice, ‘please, let me in! I’m stuck out here, and I won’t survive the night! Please! Let me in!’ and it went on and on, the words travelling a torn and damaged throat before escaping and breaking through the endless rustling of pebbles on lead.

‘Don’t open it!’ another voice commanded. It was the voice of my mother, who wore an expression of terror I hadn’t known her to be capable of feeling. The fear stripped her of any compassion, almost giving her complexion a look of near death, and the woman that grabbed my arms and held me in place resembled little the woman that raised me; the one I loved and cared for.

I was arrested in place, the piercing nails of my mother’s clasping hands crucified me to the spot I held on the floor. We stood there mutely, as the shrieks tore through the air and ripped our eardrums.

‘Please! Oh please, oh God, please open the door! Please, I won’t make it! I’m begging you!’

They would not cease. Their rising tone and mounting desperation overwhelmed the drumming of pebbles, and soon the crying words were all I could hear. ‘Please! Please! Please!’ Soon the speech devolved into one word; a word that accrued all prior pain and suffering, grasping the torture the person was enduring and deflecting it onto me, a bystander who stood motionless, never daring to release myself from the claws that held me, and discover what it was that had completely transformed my mother into her state of distress. What threat loomed on the other side of the door that was worth risking this person’s suffering? ‘Please! Please! Please…’ The begging quietened down, lowering to a flat tone, then a whisper, and I could feel it persist a little while longer from under the clamour of the pebble rain, once more audible.

After the voice was long passed, my mother and I still did not move. She held me with the same ardour, the same immovable force that stationed me without the power to release myself, the same terror that was first instilled in her from the moment she heard the first cry for help. We stood like that, holding on to one another, listening as the pebble rain lowered in intensity, to a pebble shower, then a drizzle, and then stopped entirely. Even in the silence we dared not move, but with the rain gone I could feel my mother’s static grip loosen, and eventually she let me go.

‘Open it,’ she dryly commanded. It took some effort to move my legs, the fear still lingering in my muscles, but I finally reached the door handle, and pressing down on it with a careful and weary pressure, slowly pulled the door ajar.

Outside was a sunny day. We had stood there all night. On the ground lay not a single pebble, evaporating immediately after landing, as they always do. Right at my feet, reaching in with a motionless hand, was the corpse of a woman, mangled and excoriated by thousands of lacerations, revealing bruised pulps of muscle nad tarnishing our door with flecks of flesh that were thrown off her youthful body when the stones struck her without any remorse. The pebble rain had eviscerated her clothes entirely, leaving but a bare skeleton lying on our doorstep, in places having ripped down right to the bone, which lay exposed and scratched by the multitude of tiny rocks that struck against it. Her face was unrecognisable, and had we not witnessed her screams only hours before, we would have said she had been dead for years.

When I looked to my mother, who too was glaring silently at the corpse at our doorstep, an expression of stern decisiveness sprawled over her face.

‘Never give the demons a chance to enter your home,’ she said crassly, ‘it’s better they take her, and not us.’

With that, she left me with the skeleton at my feet, tending to some other business that needed to be tended to.

I closed the door, and have feared opening it since.

16.VIII.2021