The Rain Knew
by B.C. Brock
The digger, in canvas work pants and a flat cap, leaned on the worn, warm handle of his
shovel. He paused his work for a brief moment of rest. He wiped sweat from his brow, then
remembered the browned handkerchief tucked into his back left pocket.
The ground was soft—spring rains had seen to that. Easier to dig, but heavier somehow,
like the earth didn’t want to let go. Maybe it was just the water, he thought.
But no—there was something else. Perhaps the earth did not want to let go so easily.
Perhaps.
He spotted a wooden stake a few feet away—freshly driven, slightly crooked. No name
yet—just a number. People passed through Winderberry like the breeze—quickly, quietly, and
easily forgotten.
But the gravedigger remembered. He always remembered. Every face. Every hastily
filled-out form. Every shakily written note. Every story murmured by those who came to say
goodbye—he remembered them all.
He’d arrived three months ago—a quiet man with deep-set eyes who hummed a tune
under his breath, always the same, but never loud enough to place. He worked an odd job here
and there to make cash for necessities. He always asked to be paid in cash, and he never asked
for more than the work was worth. Sometimes he’d sit under the oak tree near the cemetery and
talk to the wind as it blew in.
“I don’t want a deep grave,” he’d said once, like it was nothing more than weather talk.
“Just enough for the earth to cover me. I want to feel the rain.”
The clouds rolled in, thick and gray, streaked with black. The digger looked up and
waited. The first drop fell—gentle, almost kind. It touched the back of his hand, ran down his
arm, and fell silently into the soil.
A shallow grave. Just as he asked.
B.C. Brock (he/him) is a neurodivergent, Southern writer and high school English teacher whose work explores the haunted landscapes of memory, myth, and resistance. His stories, ignited by buried histories, utopian longing, and the fire of revolution, blend speculative flair with the gothic traditions of the Deep South. Informed by his studies of literature, theology, and philosophy, Brock shapes stories that dwell in the shadowed borderlands where ideas resist forgetting. He lives with his wife and two children in the magnolia haunted piedmont of Georgia, finding inspiration in the tension between beauty and ruin, faith and fury. As a neurodivergent author, he works to turn cognitive difference into creative force—writing from the edges, where the cracks let the light in. Find him on Instagram.
