7Prologue
Rain, rain, go away
Come again another day
Little children want to play
Blah blah, blah blah-blah. . .
He winced. And grimaced. And winced again. His face contorted to a zillion faces of unimaginable horror. The song came back to haunt him as it said it would. His narrow eyes squished up, squeezing the tears in his eyes like sour juice from an orange. Here he was, just stupidly standing in his empty lonely study room though he didn't study in it very often and why would he? He was 29 years old, no, he was kneeling by then, pulling on his frills and stretched them to the point of ripping or cracking of that corn chip between his serrated teeth, only for the song to grow louder. And it disappeared, finally, and he collapsed with a loud thud and crack. It couldn't have been his back; it was already bent from sleeping on the moldy bed, where bedbugs ate the crust from his eyes and used his scales as dinner plates.
He cried so shrilly and so happily, he wouldn't care if the rain poured through the ceiling, the plaster fell on his face and the floor would break from the weight of it all and the earth swallowed him in an early burial.
It did.
Moment after moment, a clawed hand rose weakly from the coffin-shaped hole in the floor and his long narrow head was decorated with splinters and he choked out a bony hand which held a card saying, "For you, my love. PS: I married your sister-in-law."
The dragon-human barely got his tail out when the song struck him like lightning on a sunny day when the early picnickers wore their gay clothes and roasted chicken fell from who-knows-where. When the first line was over, the blue pitiful demi-human wept and vomited, though he couldn't because he was abstinent in the first place and he had anorexic problems since the toilet incident.
Something fell from his shoulder and it fell with a plop, but not really a plop but more like mush, because he brought in mud from the floor - oh how ashamed he was when he later realized he did and cursed many a foreign expletive when he recalled he was 29 years old and he wasn't living with his mother - and that something was defiled in the dirt, cuz it certainly wasn't making mud pies.
At length he rose his grimed head and saw what fell. It was a key chain, but it was no ordinary key chain. This one could sing prettier than he could whistle, though woodpeckers often pecked at his face in reply to whistles. And it wasn't those electronic voice boxes, but a real voice. It was too real, he decided and pinched his scales as if to wake himself up.
He did.
His head shook like a blender, realizing all those stupid stuff happened and all those stupid stuff he did was in his insignificant mind. Mind you, it was so insignificant that he banged his head against the window - why he was near a window was beyond reason. You couldn't tell who to pity more - him or the window.
Then he heard a voice from his dream, which came from his shoulder pad - no, shoulders don't talk - and he took the key chain with his head still on the window where the rain splattered outside. But he didn't bother to remember what the voice sang, because he just realized the rain was there in front of him and he cried and make squeaky noises from his mouth that registered as whimpers and he sang to keep his imaginary ghosts at bay:
"Rain, rain, go away. . ."