Theme of Absence has published RAIN, a very short story about a young boy who sees another boy in a rainstorm—a boy who has been missing for two years.
This is very much an homage to Ray Bradbury's stories like those in The Halloween Tree, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and Dandelion Wine.
I grew up voraciously reading everything Bradbury wrote. My mother was in one of those books-by-mail club, and I remember once convincing her to buy 11 of his books one month. I still have them all today.
Those books are the single biggest influence on my writing today. As an adult, I grew to love Henry Miller just as much, and I feel like the two of them have mixed in my head to create some kind of weird hybrid monster that is my fiction.
But this piece is solely a tribute to Bradbury. As a young boy reading his stories, it wasn't hard to picture myself in the shoes of his characters, and the sense of wonder with a little edge of terror has permeated my writing to this day. So, that's what RAIN is about—the wonder I felt as a boy coming to understand the widening world, and the hint of terror that came with realizing how naive you were about some of the adult world's mysteries.
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