Rain
Hazel is looking out of the window. It's raining. Hazel likes rain,
which is quite lucky with the amount that England gets. If it's quiet
and raining, at least there's something to mask the silence. Hazel's
noticed that some sounds, like quiet music or the sound of typing,
don't stop the silence. You can still hear the emptiness, behind the
noise. But traffic noise, people talking in another room, and rain -
they're background noise, and that's what Hazel needs.
The scratchlike lines and scattered tapping merge into a steady hiss
and sheets of rain that you can only see if you look behind it, and
Hazel keeps watching.
The only way you can see the drops without looking somewhere else is to
look at the plants. Hazel tries not to notice the way all the leaves
are curved to let everything drip off - she's not one to let biology
spoil the moment.
This is the kind of heavy rain that noone likes to walk in, the kind
that sticks all your eyelashes together and waterlogs your skin. The
kind that means Abigail wil have to find her wellies if she wants to go
in the garden without getting mud up to her elbows.
Hazel likes to stand outside sometimes, in the needle-thin silent rain
that freezes your bones, for just long enough to let her enjoy the
feeling of warming up again. But this heavy, almost solid downpour
would soak her within seconds, would make it a necessity rather than a
pleasure.
Hazel remembers that the only reason she noticed that it was starting
to rain was that she was supposed to be closing the curtains, and does
so before anyone notices she's lost in a world of her own.