“Where the Rain Went Silent”

Havenmoss never stopped raining.

Not once in ninety-four years.

Old folk said the clouds were grieving and had forgotten how to finish a sentence.

Roofs were moss, gutters sang permanent lullabies, and every child learned to swim before they walked.

Then, on the first Tuesday of October 2023, the rain stopped mid-drop.

No warning.

No wind.

One moment the sky was crying as usual; the next, every raindrop hung frozen in the air like a city of glass beads.

Then they simply vanished.

The silence that followed was physical.

It pressed against eardrums, made dogs howl, made Mrs. Tregidder drop her best teapot in the bakery.

By evening the town was holding its breath.

That was when we noticed the footprints.

They started at the war memorial and walked straight down Church Lane, through the square, past the school, and stopped outside the old rain-gauge house (the one nobody had opened since 1931, when the keeper, Miss Elspeth Carey, locked the door from the inside and was never seen again).

The footprints were barefoot, small, and perfectly dry.

My sister Lottie (eleven, fearless, collector of secrets) decided we had to investigate.

We waited until midnight.

The rain-gauge house was a narrow brick box with a cupola on top and a brass gauge like a giant thermometer still full of water that hadn’t moved in ninety-four years.

The padlock crumbled when Lottie touched it (rust and time finally giving up).

Inside smelled of wet paper and pennies.

On the floor lay a single oilskin notebook open to a page dated 12 September 1931.

Elspeth Carey’s handwriting, neat as pins:

They think the rain is weather.

It isn’t.

It’s memory.

Every drop is a secret someone told the sky instead of another person.

I have been collecting them since I was nine.

Today the gauge is full.

If it ever empties, the town will have to remember everything it made me keep.

At the bottom of the page, in fresher ink:

I’m sorry.

I can’t carry it alone anymore.

Under the notebook was a small glass stopper, the kind you’d pull from a giant bottle.

Lottie looked at me.

I looked at the gauge.

The water inside was swirling now, slow as smoke.

We understood at the same moment.

The rain hadn’t stopped.

It had been let go.

We ran outside.

The suspended drops were reappearing (millions of them, trembling, waiting for permission).

Lottie reached for the sky with both hands.

“Let them fall,” she said, loud enough for the clouds to hear.

The drops obeyed.

They fell all at once, harder than any storm Havenmoss had ever known.

And with them came the secrets.

Mrs. Tregidder’s voice in the bakery: “I never loved my husband.”

Old Mr. Penrose on his porch: “I stole the church silver in 1962.”

The mayor’s wife: “The baby wasn’t his.”

Every regret, every lie, every kindness never spoken—falling with the rain, loud as bells.

People stood in the street, faces upturned, crying and laughing at the same time.

By morning the gauge was empty.

The sky was the colour of a fresh beginning.

And it hasn’t rained since.

Some nights, when the wind moves a certain way, you can still hear a faint tapping on roofs—like someone testing if the town is ready to keep its own secrets again.

We never are.

So the sky stays dry.

And Miss Elspeth Carey’s footprint (small, barefoot, and perfectly dry) still walks Church Lane every first Tuesday of October.

She doesn’t stop at the rain-gauge house anymore.

She keeps going.

Out of Havenmoss.

Toward whatever comes after forgiveness.

We wave when we see her.

We owe her that much.

Silence, it turns out, was never the loudest sound.

Relief was.