Rainy Day Joe

I found him one morning when I went to take out the rubbish. He lay in the grass, clutching a piece of dirty plastic in his tiny baby hands. His eyes were closed and he didn’t seem to be breathing. His crumpled clothes were strangely fluorescent. As if shiny fish were swimming around them. He was as light as a feather and gave only a quiet sigh when I picked him up. Back at home I wrapped him in a blanket and poured gallons of hot tea down his throat. It took ages for him to open his eyes.

He looked like a child or a dwarf. In short, like a creature from another world.

He never told me who he was or where he’d come from. And I couldn’t pronounce his name properly; it sounded a bit like Joe, but with a lisp. He had big sad eyes that kept changing colour, from a pink tint in the morning, turning to dark green and then to a dark ochre as the day went on.

He spoke in a weird lisping voice. It sounded like the rustling of a paper bag. I taught him to talk, use cutlery and flush the toilet after use. He loved stewed cherries. And on long rainy nights, as we lay naked on a multicoloured rug, he caressed my body with a bit of sheep fur. He stared at everything in amazement, opening those huge eyes wide, and so did I.

I was fascinated by his masculine yet tiny body, his perfectly formed buttocks and beautifully shaped feet. They never smelled.

After lovemaking I watched him as he slept. His curly eyelashes fluttered with the rhythm of his dream. Like runaway horses. He loved to dance in a white ballerina dress I bought him. He looked like a lovely dancing sprite. He never reproached me about anything, never harassed me and never yelled at me. Our relationship was like a chance encounter that was repeated on a daily basis. And every day amazed us anew.

He was frightened of storms. When it was pouring outside, he would stand by the window, raise his finger and lisp, “Joe mushn’t get shoaked!” And I would say, “Don’t worry, darling, I’ll buy you an umbrella, as big as a giant burdock leaf.” That made Joe laugh. When he laughed he made me forget all about reality and lies.

We never left the house except to go to the front garden, and only on sunny days at that, when there wasn’t a cloud in the sky and the wind dispelled Joe’s fear of rain.

Gold-coloured leaves floated down from the trees, and he would glue them to my body. A velvet-pawed kitten he had brought home was our breakfast companion. And the thin trail of honey I licked off his thighs in the evenings seemed never to end.

One day Joe and I were rolling about in red paint on a huge sheet of drawing paper. The doorbell rang and I found my ex-boyfriend at the door. We hadn’t seen each other for a year. Long enough that it didn’t bother me. In no time at all, before I knew it, he was inside the house, a bottle in his hand and a broad grin on his face. “I just wanted to see you,” he exclaimed, planting a long kiss on my cheek.

I staggered back and fumbled with my red hands to close my towelling robe, from which a breast was popping out.

“This is Joe,” I said, pointing to the little red man parading around my room naked. Joe had never been shy but when he saw a huge man stare at him in astonishment he went to fetch his ballerina dress, just in case.

“This is Eduard,” I said to him. Joe stood in front of Eduard, his mouth open wide, admiring the hand Eduard had reached out to him.

“Wow, he is sho big!” Joe chirruped.

“Eduard is my ex,” I added but Joe just raised his beautiful eyes, still pink at this time of the day, and said, “He’s enormoush.”

We sat down at the table. Eduard opened the bottle and while Joe went to clean up, he asked with a sneer, “Don’t tell me this is your new boyfriend?”

I snapped back, “Yes, he’s my new boyfriend and he’s from Iceland.”

“Come on, he’s got a lisp and he’s just a tiny dwarf,” Eduard taunted me, pouring himself some wine.

“Look, Eduard, you would also have a lisp if you spoke Icelandic and it doesn’t matter that some people are small and others big. Now tell me, what is it that you want?”

Eduard came up with every cliché in the book, from how lovely I looked, to how hard his life was and eventually blurted out that he needed somewhere to crash for two weeks.

That day didn’t end well. Joe made friends with Eduard, who got him drunk. Joe spent the whole night throwing up into a bucket by the bed and laughing out loud. And Eduard stayed.

Suddenly everything was different. The house was full of Eduard; he filled the whole place, my fridge was cluttered with beer cans, wherever I moved I would trip over his stuff and I had to listen to his booming voice. He gave me a headache. His jokes drove me mad and the way he fumbled with his fork made me want to bite his hand off. But what hurt me most was seeing Joe change. He was enraptured by Eduard, following his every step and imitating everything he did.

Eduard took advantage of this, of course, and taught him everything he thought a real man ought to know. And I mean everything: from spitting down from the balcony to swearwords, which he claimed would come in handy at football games. Joe no longer wanted to wear ballerina dresses. He made me buy him the kind of clothes Eduard wore. And once he put on trousers and a baseball T-shirt he looked like an ordinary, tiny, ridiculous man. No longer like a creature from another world. His face coarsened, he drank beer and spent all day watching TV with Eduard. He no longer danced. And he didn’t amaze me any longer either. From time to time he would still cuddle up to my tummy, looking over his shoulder to check that Eduard couldn’t see him. Meanwhile I was counting the days. Two weeks. It had to come to an end.

However, two days before he left, Eduard had the brilliant idea of taking Joe to the pub, for a kind of stag party. That devil, Eduard. Outside it was raining cats and dogs. Raindrops sang a gurgling song in the drains. Joe hesitated for a moment, while I raised my finger and reminded him that he mustn’t get wet. But Eduard slapped him on the back and said he had an umbrella and that he shouldn’t be a wimp and scared of rain. Joe gave me a wink and followed Eduard out into the dismal weather. Before they had got too far from the gate the wind turned Joe’s umbrella inside out and I could see through the misted-up windowpane that the rain hit him right in the face. I heard Joe’s lisping scream. He threw the umbrella away and thin, candyfloss-like threads began to unravel from his body. I ran out of the house. Joe began to dissolve. Quietly, like when a paper handkerchief drops out of your pocket and the rain turns it into a translucent sugar cube. His face began to disappear. I tried to drag him back but all I was left with was his clothes and those limpid emerald-green eyes, fluttering like wounded butterflies.

Eduard left. The devil. Now I spend long rainy days sitting in a white ballerina dress, writing about the day I took out the rubbish and found a creature clutching a piece of dirty plastic.