2025 fiction contest winner

Rain is Spelled: Rain

Edie Reaney Chunn

1.

My mother gave me her mother’s sewing scissors as I was packing to move out. She had kept them sharp her entire life, and made me promise never to use them on anything but fabric and thread. 

“Not paper,” she said. “Never cardboard—or tape,” she added, eyeing the half-packed moving boxes that sat on the floor of my room like driftwood washed ashore. 

“I promise,” I said. 

I swept an armful of paper and things off my desk and into a box, then placed the scissors in their silk pouch on top.

The box was full. I taped it shut, cutting the tape with my teeth. Desk crap, I scrawled on the cardboard. My mother frowned. And scissors, I added. 

 

2.

I moved across the country to study theatre production and design. Once I was in my new place, I started babysitting for a lesbian couple who lived down the street. Their five-year-old daughter, Ruby, went to a small outdoor education school by the beach. The school was at the bottom of a hill so steep cement ridges were moulded into the sidewalk. I picked my way down them to meet Ruby on days when I had class in the morning but was free in the afternoon, taking too-small steps, breathing in salt off the ocean and the rain that was on its way. 

Ruby would wait for me by the school gate, thumbs hooked into her red backpack straps. The first thing we had to do was make our way back up that hill: Ruby would hold my hand and then drop it with each step, turning her arm into a pendulum that powered her upwards. Ruby was full of these pendulum-like movements: her thumb ran back and forth across her fingertips when she watched me read or write for her, and she would nod her head up and down as she arranged her stuffed animals into endless circles and loops. 

I would step slowly as we climbed, catching and releasing her hand. Neither of us ever said a word until we had cleared the hill by a block or two. Then, Ruby would begin a conversation. 

“Who are you being today?” Ruby asked. 

I was stumped, until I realised that she wanted me to make something up.

“When will I learn to read?” she asked another time. 

“Soon,” I replied, because I knew that this was true: Ruby was as close to being able to read as a person could possibly be while still not being able to do it.

Once, after we had crested the hill, she stared solemnly at the sky for a few moments. 

“I think there’s weather,” she said.

 

3.

I told my roommates about Ruby and all the things she said. 

“Ruby said, ‘I think there’s weather’ today,” I told them. 

 

4.

One of my roommates always thought her hair was too long. I finally agreed to cut her hair, which was dark and thick like ivy. She sat on a chair in the bathroom and I pulled my grandmother’s sewing scissors out of their silk pouch. I could only bring myself to cut off a little of her hair at a time. 

“Yeah, a little more?” she asked every time I stopped, turning her head from side to side, inspecting herself in the mirror.

Our other roommates listened to ABBA while we swept inch-long snips of her hair into paper towels, though much of it stuck in the cracks between the tiles of the floor. 

“Ella and Theo are gonna lose their minds about this,” I said, gesturing to the hair that was left behind.

“Don’t worry,” she said confidently. “They’ll never notice.”

We balled up the paper towels and dropped them in the garbage.

I was riddled with guilt for using the sewing scissors on something that wasn’t fabric. Every time I thought about the hair buried between the tiles, I had to spend twenty minutes trying to convince myself the others wouldn’t notice—they had other things, school, work, on their minds.

 

5.

There was one design teacher at the college who never taught us anything. Instead, she told us about specific, random plays she had worked on without giving any context or explanation as to why she was sharing her experiences of that production. She was a lighting designer and always wore all black, as if someone had told her she had to. She seemed collected, even cold, until she started to speak about the plays. Then, her collectedness evaporated. It wasn’t that she was enthusiastic; it was that she didn’t make any sense when she spoke. 

She would speak for an hour, then tell us to leave early. This was frustrating because the class started at eight in the morning, and at 9:05, when I walked out of the building, I would be left feeling like I hadn’t yet woken up from my dreams from the night before. 

This feeling wouldn’t leave me until I got home and re-enacted the lecture for my roommate, whose hair was the right length, and who had just woken up. 

 

6.

Ruby told me her school was putting on a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I knew this play was one of the most popular Shakespeare pieces, but I felt disheartened every time I heard it was being produced. How many productions could one play stand? 

 

7.

Our teacher told us about an experimental production of Hamlet where the lights would fade up and down at random intervals. At the start of the play, all the lights turned on together, then they darkened and brightened, patternless, for the rest of the play. The idea was that the lights would show an actor’s expression or movement for a moment and then return them to darkness. They would catch and release the text from illumination to obscurity. Our teacher said the point was that what an audience could not see was as important as what they saw. The lights caught fragments and, collectively, the fragments gestured toward a whole. She said the lights and the script entered a state of syncopation that resembles the way we use words to generate meaning. 

I wasn’t sure. I imagined how challenging that would be as an actor, to know that half of your work would never be seen, snips of hair swept between cracks in the floor. I imagined being an audience member, straining to stitch together moments I caught from rhythmless light. 

 

8.

Remarkably, Ruby was cast as Demetrius in her school’s production. I was somewhat dismayed. Demetrius had always struck me as jealous and privileged, over-certain of his needs and wants. Ruby told me no one else had wanted to play him, so she volunteered. I was surprised that someone who didn’t yet know how to read was expected to memorize lines, but then I remembered that those things didn’t have to go together. 

“And there are two of all four fairies,” she said. “Eight fairies in total. And there are three Pucks.”

“Three Pucks?” I echoed, amazed. 

Ruby laughed.

“Have you ever played Demetrius?” she asked. 

“No,” I replied, though I took a moment to think about it. I had never been certain about what I wanted or didn’t want. “Do you like playing him?” 

“Not really,” Ruby said. “I’m only doing it because no one else wanted to.”

“Are you learning anything from it?” 

We walked in silence while she thought.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s hard to act like you love someone when you don’t actually love them. And it’s hard to act like you don’t love someone when they act like they love you.”

 

9.

My roommate and I went to the thrift store together. Ruby’s moms had asked me if I could help make costumes for the play and I had agreed, eager to put my mother’s sewing scissors to their proper use. We looked for bed sheets and tablecloths to transform into tunics and capes.

My roommate lifted a corner of silver polyester. 

“This could be for Moonshine,” she said. 

I nodded. 

Later, I started drafting out the pieces for the costumes. I worried that my scissors would have lost their edge, but they cut through the fabric easily, raindrops slicing paths down window panes. 

 

10.

Ruby wanted to help me sew the costumes, so I showed her how the pieces fit together and let her pin the edges to each other, right sides facing. 

“Am I reading?” she asked. “Or writing?”

“Both,” I promised, watching as she slid the pins into the fabric, a line of crooked letters. 

 

11.

There was weather on the night of Ruby’s school’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream—it poured rain. I had invited all of my roommates, but none of them was free. 

Earlier in the day, I bought a bouquet of yellow roses to give to Ruby. I examined them as I waited by the front door for Ruby and her moms to pick me up and drive me to the school — some of the petals were only just beginning to open, yellow filtering through pale green. 

Just as Ruby’s mama pulled into the driveway and I was heading out the door, my roommate sprinted down the stairs. 

“I’m coming too!” she said, throwing a rain jacket over her shoulders.

We piled into the back seat of their car, Ruby bright-eyed and bouncing between us. 

“Don’t look at your flowers,” I teased, pretending to hide them from her. 

She took my hand with both of hers, then let it go. 

“The rain it rain his every day,” she said. 

“Raineth,” her mama corrected from the front seat. 

Ruby repeated the word rain quietly under her breath, and we drove to the school. 

 

12.

The performance took place in the school gym, which was decorated with driftwood from the beach and paper flowers made out of newsprint. Somehow, it really did feel like an enchanted forest. Narrow rows of blue plastic chairs filled up the rest of the space. 

The play was abridged, which was a blessing since half of the actors were inaudible half of the time, while the other half shrieked their lines from the shadows. Sometimes, all I could hear was the rain pounding down on the roof. I sat between my roommate and Ruby’s moms, watching the characters’ earnest lives and loves unfold, with all of their mistakes along the way.

After the show, the parents crowded around grey plastic tables laden with juice boxes and Costco cookies. My roommate and I stood to the side, waiting, fanning ourselves with flimsy programs. I had made sure my roommate’s name was written next to mine where the costumes were credited. 

“So cool,” she had said when she saw it, running her finger over the letters. 

And then I noticed, through the din of the room, the design teacher who wore all black stood across the room from us—here she was in a paisley shirt with billowing purple sleeves, a juice box in one hand, one of the three Pucks clinging tightly to the other. 

She saw me and nodded. “Nice costumes,” she mouthed. 

She took a sip from her juice box. 

 

13.

The next day was calm grey. Ruby and her mom came to drop off the leftover fabric from the play. Ruby carried her bouquet of roses, slightly wilted, along with an armload of fabric. 

“She won’t let us put them in water,” her mom said. 

I let them into my apartment and showed them to my room. I found a box inside my closet. 

“I’ll keep them in here,” I said, gesturing to the scraps of fabric Ruby and her mom were carrying. 

Ruby carefully placed the fabric into the box with one hand, then collected the rest of the scraps from her mom and tucked them in around the edges. She shut the flaps of the box, then paused, the thumb of one hand flying across her fingertips. 

“Desk — crap,” she read. “And . . . skizzors?”

“Scissors,” said Ruby’s mom, kneeling down beside her. “The c is silent.”

“Strange,” Ruby replied, bringing her fingertips to touch the cardboard.

Still clutching her ragged bouquet, Ruby traced the strange and silent c.

 

14.

I felt silly about it, but after they left, it took me some time to adjust to the fact that Ruby could read. It seemed as if something monumental had changed in the world, now that the letters on the page had opened up to her. I wondered if I should wait until my roommates came home to tell them that Ruby had read something—really read something. 

 

15.

Instead, I called my mom. 

She was in a good mood when she answered the phone, her voice quick and bright. “Heard you had some real weather.”

“Big storm,” I agreed.

“What have you been up to? How’s school? How’re the roommates?” 

Briefly, I thought about confessing that I had used the sewing scissors to cut my roommate’s hair, but then I decided to leave it.

“You know the girl I babysit who lives down the street? She has two moms?”

“Yes, yes.”

“She just learned how to read. I saw her really read. For the first time.”

“What did she read?”

I told her about the cardboard box, the “desk crap and skizzors,” the wilting bouquet. My mother laughed, a yellow sound. I asked how she had been, and she told me about her colleague who turned the lights off every time he left the room. 

“It’s infuriating!” she laughed. 

 

16.

Later that week, on a day when it was both raining and not raining, I picked Ruby up from her school. We had just crested the hill, concluding our game of catching and releasing her hand. 

“Do you know how to spell everything?” she asked after a block or two.

“Not everything,” I replied.

“I do,” she said. “Everything is spelled everything.”

I smiled at the trick. 

“And I guess Ruby is spelled Ruby?”

She clapped her hands, delighted. 

“Ruby is spelled Ruby,” she echoed. “And sky is spelled sky, and rain is spelled rain.” 

I thought the list might continue, but she stopped. The sky overhead was a patchwork of silver and grey with dark, ragged edges. 

When we got back to our street, we climbed the steps to Ruby’s front porch. I opened the door and she bolted inside, intent on some secret game. 

“We’re going to use our words today!” she shouted. I wasn’t sure if she was speaking to me. 

I walked into the kitchen to empty her lunch box, unloading Tupperware into the sink. The roses were on the counter in a vase filled with water, unwilting slightly, the green buds having opened up to yellow. 

I was filled with certainty: I wanted to learn to read again. I wanted the world to open up and for words to rain down; for a pattern of light to appear and make the strange and silent meaningful. 

The way to go about something like this wasn’t clear to me, so I waited to see if another thought would come to follow that certainty. But my mind was quiet: all I could hear was the hum of the fridge and the sound of Ruby’s footsteps trailing up and down the hallway upstairs, soft, pattering, rain. 

 

Edie Reaney Chunn (they/she) lives on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) First Nations. Recently, they were shortlisted for PEN Canada’s New Voices Award (2025) and received second place in Vallum’s Chapbook Award (2025). When not writing, Edie enjoys the weather.