Miserable Heavy

For as hackneyed a subject as rain is, it's still a pretty fascinating natural phenomenon. Rain is water literally falling from the sky. It rinses everything off, washing away dirt and filth; some places, it makes more filth. For some, rain is refreshing and beautiful; for others, a rainy day means a day of gloom and sadness. Rain is so many different things to so many different people in so many different contexts, and because of this, the literary, artistic and analogical worlds have run the aesthetic of rain into the ground. That doesn't stop the rain, though; the rain could care less how you feel. It will just pour and pour or sprinkle and drizzle without giving two cents what you think. This profound apathy can be quite poetic and a topic of much contemplation in some circles; on the other hand, it can also be utterly miserable, as Jerry and Dolores have been experiencing for several hours.

The two miserable creatures sat miserably beneath a miserable-looking tree, miserably damp and chilly, surrounded by a miserable forest underneath a miserable, grey sky in the miserable valley, being barraged by a deluge of blissfully uncaring precipitation.

"I feel so miserable," said Dolores, miserably trying and failing to rub some of the damp off of her miserable, woolly coat. 

"Yes," agreed Jerry, sighing miserably. "That seems to be a theme right about now." The miserable young bull and sheep settled a little closer together under the miserable tree and sighed, the rain splattering cheerfully through the leaves and all around them on the miserable ground. The misery was so thick, you could scoop it with a spoon and serve it as some sort of miserable pudding. It was pretty miserable.

"Enough with the 'miserable's already!!" shouted Jerry towards the wet, leafy canopy that was hardly protecting he and Dolores from the apathetic cloud-spit. Dolores started at her friend's unexpected outburst, and the tree felt a little hurt that the branches with which it was trying to shelter the two would receive such an undue berating; otherwise, nothing changed, and the rain continued to fall. Honestly, he didn't have to yell.

The bull pushed himself to his feet, saying, "Come on, Dolly," to Dolores ("Dolly" being the nickname he had taken to calling her), and helping her up as well. "Let's keep going. I'm sure the wood gets thicker deeper in, and if we're going to get rained on anyway, we might as well be making progress while we do."

"Okay," Dolores sighed again, "It's just hard, because it doesn't seem like we ever make any progress.

And the rain is so wet and yuck," she added as an afterthought, wrinkling her nose at the clingy curls in her wool. Jerry let out a soft chuckle as they once again began to walk. The packed dirt road from before had given way to a sort of natural pathway once the duo found themselves approaching the fringes of the wood earlier that morning; it wound its way through the trees, occasionally branching off in random directions, sometimes doubling back on itself, and generally making it very difficult to maintain the illusion of progress indeed.

"Well, at least we're in a forest now and not the hills," Jerry pointed out.

"True," Dolores agreed absently, looking up at the steadily thickening canopy. "I can't see the sky anymore, though," she said to herself.

The two meandered down the path in relative silence for a while, save for the occasional, "Watch your step up here," or "Be careful of that branch." Just as Jerry had predicted, the trees began to grow larger and closer together, the overhanging leaves layered thicker, and even the air itself seemed to gain density. The sky continued to shed its liquid burden onto the treetops, but no precipitation made its way to the ground through the canopy aside from tree trunk runoff every so often. Dolores, who had been walking slightly behind Jerry, peered around his bovine bulk to look down the path into the gloom.

"Jerry," she said uneasily, sheepishly patting his arm. The bull, who had been lost in thought staring off just to the right of the path, shook his head and looked down at the sheep. 

"Yes, what is it?" he asked, concerned for detecting the touch of anxiety in her voice. The sheep pointed in the direction they traveled.

"Do you see the fork in the road up there?" she asked. He turned back and squinted ahead.

"Yeah, I do."

Soon, they stood before the junction: the fork to the left twisted away and disappeared behind several larger trees, their trunks barely discernable in the sylvan half-light; contrarily, the right branch seemed to dip down and curve slowly, gradually rising up some kind of ridge. 

"Which way do we go?" asked Dolores, distress coloring her voice. She stood in the center of the intersection, looking back and forth between the two choices before them.

"Dolly, we've come to splits in the road before," Jerry said, placing a hooved hand on the sheep's shoulder. She turned to look up at him, her eyes worried.

"But this time it feels different," she said. "Like we have to make the right decision or bad things will happen."

"What kind of bad things?" the bull was getting more concerned for his friend. Despite having journeyed together only a short while, Jerry had seen that the sheep would normally shrug off potential frustrations and worries, always ready to smile or sing or skip away down the road. Ever since entering the forest and the rain, however, she had been showing greater signs of fatigue and uncertainty, making small clumsy blunders where she wouldn't before and second guessing decisions such as which tree to rest under. Never before when they had come to a split in the path had she talked about a "right" way, though. 

"I don't know," she said, becoming quiet and turning to again look at the two possibilities. "I don't know what's down there."

Jerry looked at her, then the paths. He tried to think carefully. It wasn't as though they had any clear direction or destination; as such, choosing one way or the other wouldn't set them off course.

"How do we know which way is the right way?" he asked.

"I don't know!" bleated Dolores anxiously. She sat on the ground and hung her head, squeezing her eyes shut, and whimpered softly. The bull sat down beside her and put his arm around her fluffy back.

"Hey, Dolly," he said gently, "It's all right. You don't have to cry."

"But now we're stopped," she sniffled without raising her head, "And it's all my fault because I got scared for no reason. And I don't even know which way is the right or wrong way, and now I'm crying because I don't want to decide. We went through all those other forks without having a problem and now I'm making a problem at this one. I'm being stupid."

"You're not being stupid," Jerry told her. "Don't say that. You can't just ignore your feelings if it's different than the other times. Maybe there really is a right and a wrong way this time, but since we don't know which is which, we just have to pick one and hope for the best. We have to trust we picked the right one, or else there would be no point to keep going."

"Yeah," she mumbled. "I wish we didn't have to walk on the path at all."

The bull gave her a comforting squeeze. "Maybe later, but for now, let's just stick to the road, okay?" Dolores sniffed and nodded, wiping her nose on a large leaf by her hand. "Okay," Jerry said finally, and then he stood and picked up his friend, carefully setting her on his shoulders. "I say we go left."

"Okay," Dolores agreed after a moment. And so Jerry stepped forward onto the left branch, and once they had passed out of the small clearing in which the paths converged, the sheep let out a breath she had been holding. She gently patted the space between his ears.

"Thank you, nice cow," she said. 

He smiled. "Don't mention it."

Jerry with Dolores made his way around the bends until he reached the place where the path had disappeared. Rounding the stand of trees, the two were blinded by sunlight as the bull stumbled out of the wood and into a meadow.