Night Shower
By Dustin Parsons
I’m paying attention to the tornado watch that may become a tornado warning across all of north Mississippi. It was calm outside when I came to bed, but in Mississippi in spring the weather can change that fast. My wife is taking a night shower that lets a depth of humid air escape from the bathroom, and its faint steam falls just short of reaching me. Listen, I’m dropping parts of myself, my shoulders that hurt so much every night, my head, my neck, my stomach and my toes, until eventually I’m just ears, sensing sound and keeping balance.
You want to grant me a last request? Let it be to overhear a shower as I fade into sleep. The slick sound of water padding on tile fades me. And I am fading when I’m brought back by this memory: twenty-five years ago and my father hired a man to come and find a water well. He was a local guy on his lunch break from John Deere, and he brought two brass rods with him that he held like six-shooters. He was a water witcher, a diviner, a dowser, but he looked like any other hired hand in my small Kansas hometown. He walked along the ground until the rods crossed themselves, and marked his place and kept going, eventually outlining what he claimed was an underground stream. Then he let me try with the rods. I went across the ground stepping slowly like in a wedding procession and felt the water-electricity turn the rods across one another.
In the eighteenth century human hair measured humidity better than anything. Hair can pull moisture from the air, expand, and be measured in weather houses that looked like shadow boxes. How incredible to know we possess all the tools to measure what we can’t see. Our skin thrives on it, our hair curls with it. We are natural gauges—we feel it in the air like a too-tight suit, or purr under it like a weighted blanket.
I feel invisible water everywhere. I hear the rain on the roof from inside my office. I hear the drain of the dish washer in the evening hours after dinner is done and the kids are off to bed. The world’s great circulation of condensation on my cup of ice water on the night stand will evaporate before I wake. I’ve seen the world just before a tornado emerges in a field. Ask anyone who has been near one, they’ve felt the static electricity like another sense, an awe just when you thought you knew what the world contained.
My wife finishes her shower and comes to bed, drying her hair beneath a towel. She glistens beautiful like spring storms with a smile. A single strand of hair peeks out of her towel and the humidity follows her out of the bathroom. You can feel it, the thick air caressing your skin, tangling your hair. It is the calm after the edginess of being under a tornado warning. Like you could, just for a second, see all the invisible things around you.
About the Author
Dustin Parsons is the author of _Exploded View: Essays on Fatherhood, With Diagrams_. His work has appeared in many magazines and journals such as The Georgia Review, Waxwing, Brevity, Copper Nickel, and many others.
