AFTER THE RAIN (Bonus edition)

20. Bambi's mother was six feet under

Stormy and Marcus sat on the side of the road, watching the sun go down over the Kenyan landscape. The sunset was quite spectacular, and Marcus couldn't quite remember when last he'd sat in silence, doing nothing while watching the sun go down... had he ever done this?

The landscape around them was surprisingly flat. The rich rust color of the sand that surrounded them deepened further in the fading light of the setting sun. The world looked like it was bathed in a bright orange glow. As the sun dipped further and further and the first star pierced the dark blue sky, the land around them seemed to come alive with strange noises. Unrecognizable noises. Noises Marcus didn't particularly like. "Um... I think we should get into the car now," he said to Stormy, standing up. He'd stolen a few glances at her over the last half hour or so, and she'd been picking on the protein bar with disgust, nibbling the edges and rolling it between her fingers. It had amused him, but now it looked like she had managed to finish the whole thing.

"Scared you might have to wrestle a man-eating lion?" Stormy teased, climbing to her feet and dusting her dress off.

"Something like that," Marcus smiled as he and Stormy walked back towards the car. And then a thought struck him. He was shocked he hadn't had it earlier, maybe it was all that talk of his... well, how the hell were they going to spend the night together? In that? It would put the two of them in really close proximity to each other. Not a good idea. Marcus felt like he needed a distraction,

"So, how was the post-apocalyptic bar?"

"It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be," she admitted to him with a smile.

"So what are we going to do in here?" Marcus asked.

"We could get to know each other, in a friend zone sense?" Stormy offered.

Marcus nodded, "Okay. So tell me, how did you happen upon your name? I've been wondering about that since I met you." Marcus could see, even in this dim light that her expression suddenly changed, and she looked more solemn than he'd seen her look before. She seemed sad, even.

"Well..." she started slowly and tentatively. "Apparently, the story goes that my mother actually gave birth to me in a storm."

"Apparently?" Marcus asked, confused. Surely everyone knew the story of how they came into the world?

"I don't really know my mother – I've only met her once. So I don't really know what's true and what's not," she explained. Marcus watched as she started to do that hair-twirling thing again.

"What happened to her?" he asked, treading lightly now. He could see this was a sensitive issue.

"Um... she left me to run off with this cult. People of the Moonbeam, or something like that. Apparently, though, when she held me in her arms for the first time, the rain cleared and she saw a rainbow..."

Marcus felt a sense of pity welling up inside him, and he couldn't help but reach over and touch her face gently, reassuringly. She reached up and took his hand in hers and held it tightly.

***

Stormy had often pictured the moment when she was born, and tried to imagine the perfect bliss her mother must have felt, holding her tiny baby girl in her arms as Mother Nature rewarded her labors with a riot of colors emblazoned across the sky... But somehow, her mother had still been able to walk away, leaving Stormy with nothing more than the image of a rainbow to remind her of her mother. No matter how old she was, or how many years had passed, the thought still saddened her, somewhere in her very core. It was as if the pain had been incorporated into her DNA. That acute sense of rejection. It's unnatural for a mother to give her child away, and Stormy had often wondered if there had been something wrong with her... But she couldn't let her mind go down this path again. It was a path that lead her to the unhappy place, where Bambi's mother was six feet under and there were no pots of shiny gold.