roots of good deed rain

The name of my new press

GOOD DEED RAIN 

comes from a short story

I wrote many moons ago.

It was first published in
Tucker Katonah's  magazine THE DECLINE
on Saint John Street in Portland, Maine.

I guess that issue is from 1989 or so.

 

Good Deed Rain

                The richest man in Sao Paulo had a magic umbrella. 

When he opened the umbrella, an endless supply of money green 

rain would waterfall out. He would let it pile up to his knees 

then shut the black umbrella solemnly and put it back inside 

the safe, on the shelf in there.

                Nobody knew how he was getting all the money 

he was spending. Before, he had nothing, but now he was 

buying houses, land, cars, airplanes…anything that had

a pricetag he would buy. Except for an occasional loss of 

peace of mind, the money gave him whatever he wanted.

                Lately while it poured, he strangely wondered 

why he had been so lucky. It bothered him and he dreamed 

about buying the world and giving every person a 

million dollars…Sometime with the morning sun dripping
his window panes and collecting in a glass of orange juice 

on his plush carpeted floor, the richest man in the city had 

a vision of kindliness. He would pour the money out over
the slums that surrounded him and seeped through the city
of Sao Paolo like cockroach dancing.

Feeling so benevolent (he even felt above his head
for a halo) he climbed into his distinctive bright yellow chauffered helicopter with his umbrella on his lap and commanded in a Moses-voice, “Hurry! Off to the slums!”

Minutes later. Hovering over the crumbling poverty of breakfast blue smoke fires and tin rust roofs. Cardboard walls and flies crawling the faces of children who stopped fighting only to poke their hands at the sky, to where the golden helicopter buzzed in place directly overhead.                                                                        
He opened the umbrella, leaning out the door like Zeus with his thunderbolt. He smiled as money fluttered down, laughing for a moment at the thought that this act would no doubt buy him sainthood—picturing statues of himself in town squares strewn with flowers and humbling townsfolk kneeling before the altar of his image. He ordered the pilot to circle round and round while he shook the umbrella manna out of the sky. Closing his eyes he basked in the hot Osiris sun, the roar of blades overhead the roar of the faithful, and he slowly opened his eyes to see his pyramids below…

Instead, he was horrified to see spluttering hundreds of rotten yams dropping Earthwards. Screaming panic, he wrenched at the umbrella trying to close it, but the mechanics of it were jammed with foul yam slime. He shook it, rammed it against the rocking helicopter, staining its bee-yellow hide. But the umbrella wouldn’t close and continued to spray its pestilence down on the poor people of Sao Paolo.

Frenzy seized, he edged too far out the doorway and tumbled out, gripping the umbrella pole, handled like a lifeline in the palm of the sky, praying in his leg kicking dervish freefall that it could somehow parachute him safely.

But rancid yams were pouring down over him, soft thousands sticking to his sleeves, shoulders and hair. He just fell faster to the ground, with the yams flashing by, the whole world looking brown and green. Instead of hitting the ground, he hit a mountain of deep vegetable mush and sunk. Down inside that gloom he waited two days to be mined out.

GOOD DEED RAIN
was also the name of a little
short story collection I made in 1990
stapled with a glued color cover.
You can read it here on my
June 2009 blog posting:

http://allenfrostlibrary.blogspot.com/2009/06/vic-shingles-ghastly-puppets-good-deed.html