“I Won’t Open My Eyes” and “Where There’s Rain, There’s …” in Weathering Youth
Because Weathering Youth is my biggest collection to date, I’m grouping the short stories and flash fiction stories in pairs for my posts, based on the way they fall in the collection. This lets me look at the connections between the stories and how I decided to arrange specific stories in the collection!
“I Won’t Open My Eyes” and “Where There’s Rain, There’s …” are both first person flash fiction pieces, but they have very little in common other than that. The former is possibly one of the most gory stories I have, but because the narrator of that story doesn’t open her eyes for the entirety of it, the gore is only described in terms of her senses of smell, hearing, and touch (distantly). Meanwhile, the latter is a sweet and surreal story involving a fantastical form of cloud seeding with experimental seeds.
These two stories are really more in contrast to one another than similar. The narrator of “I Won’t Open My Eyes” encounters an unusual situation and sticks to the rules she’s set for herself in the hopes of not making things worse. The narrator of “Where There’s Rain, There’s …” charges into the situation they’re presented with and then has to backpedal when it causes a problem. So I suppose they could be seen as paired in that sense of “how is our protagonist going to face their situation?”
Does it work out in either story? You’ll have to check out Weathering Youth to find out, as both of these stories are only published in this collection at the moment!
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