Pressed against the lilac sky, rain clouds marched across the dusty, beige hills. Haddie watched the advancing storm from her kitchen window and clicked her chipped cherry red fingernails in rhythm with the song playing on her transistor radio.
Purple rain, purple rain, purple rain.
The man’s voice pleaded as if he were stuck on a thought that was at once sorrowful and unintentionally seductive.
Jazz, Haddie’s scarlet macaw, scratched at the mauve and fuchsia threads of Grandma Heloise’s old afghan. Jazz strutted along the back of the sofa and perched himself smugly on the top of the tiffany lamp, also Grandma Heloise’s.
Purple rain, purple rain, purple rain.
There was that sorrowfulness. That catch in his throat. Rawness of emotion.
She switched the volume louder in an attempt to merge with that voice, in an attempt to absorb the freedom of that voice, the freedom to feel, to expose that raw emotion.
Then the voice stopped.
She drowned in her own sorrow as torrents of rain pelted the tin roof of Grandma Heloise’s bungalow. It had been built by her grandpa Carlton in 1939.
Time had stood still in that little space.
Time had stopped.
But the rain pelted the earth with a cruel, unrelenting voraciousness.
Haddie turned the transistor radio dial in search of that voice that had the capacity to express emotions that she had clamped down deep within herself.
Jenny W. Andrews copyright 2025
Note: Unless you’ve been living on another planet in a distant galaxy several light years away you should recognize “Purple Rain” is the title of a song sang by the musical artist Prince in 1984.
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