He Only Smokes When It Rains
ALISON SAULT
Brisbane, Australia, 2025
He only smokes when it rains.
At least, that’s what he tells me as we linger beneath the faded rainbow painted above the pub’s doorway, smoke curling from his clay pipe into the night air. I don’t know if the tobacco pouch and honest-to-God dudeen support his claim or discredit it, but after a night of beer and vodka and nothing but chips, I’m not thinking clearly.
What I do know is that I’m in love with him.
It’s crazy and fast, but the way he looks at me proves he feels the same. From the moment he raised his glass across the crowded bar, I knew this was destined to be more than my usual drunken hookups.
He’s magnetic. Everything about him calls to me, fills gaps I hadn’t realised were there. With dark hair and eyes like moonlight, he’s tall and slender and carries himself like he’s never had to ask for anything. Maybe he’s nobility. That would match the timelessness of his voice and the accent that speaks of mist-covered hills and forgotten stories. It’s melodic yet rough-edged—the perfect combination—and it cuts deep into my soul, conjuring images of magical places far from the grind of everyday life.
For a moment I let myself fantasize that he’s a fairy-tale prince come to save me from the drudgery; the type of man to make the TikTok girlies weep.
They can’t have him, though. Not when he’s mine.
‘You should come home with me.’ He says it casually, yet my knees buckle. I hide it by leaning against the doorframe, crossing my arms so I don’t look like I need the wall to hold me up.
‘You’ve already said that.’
‘Guess I really mean it, then.’ His smile is dangerous. I want to break it with my own, push us together until the space between us goes into the negative. Until we’re so close there’s only us. Never him or me or anything separate.
‘Then take me home.’
He offers me his hand, and I claim it without pause. The embers in his pipe spit and hiss as they die, but he’s leading me into the rain, and it feels so electric on my skin that I notice nothing else.
Nothing but him.
Three weeks later, when he’s long since vanished and unreachable, all I can think about is that moment. His hands in mine. Rain on my skin and tobacco on his lips. His laugh as he led me through empty streets to the hotel he called home.
I think about it until everything blurs. Until the days become nights, and the weeks slide into time I can no longer measure. I think about it until I go mad. Sly lips and roguish eyes and the curl of his dark hair.
And then I think about him until the pills prevent me from thinking anymore.
*
Dunmore, Ireland, 1847
The earth crumbles between my fingers. It’s black and damp and holds nothing. I scratch deeper, nails splitting against stones as I search for anything that might have survived. A root. A forgotten tuber. Even the memory of food would be enough now.
As dawn breaks grey over the field, and the sun brings the smell of rot, sweet and sickening, I’m still empty-handed. It’s been three weeks since we ate the last good potato. Two weeks since Ma had stopped getting out of bed. A week since I stopped counting days and started counting breaths instead.
I refuse to believe this is the end. There has to be something left out here, and my hands are moving of their own accord now, clawing and digging until my knuckles bleed. The rain has started again, mist-like and soft, but it’s enough to seep through my shawl and slick my hair to my face.
I should go back. Should check on Ma, should boil water for tea that tastes like nothing, and pretend there’s hope left in our cottage.
Instead, I dig. Deeper and deeper I go, and the only thing that stops me is the sense of being watched.
It’s then that he emerges from the mist like something conjured from morning itself, tall and impossibly clean. A clay pipe sends lazy spirals of smoke into the light rain, and the smell of tobacco makes my empty stomach clench with want.
‘Have ya lost something, a chroí?’ His voice is like warm honey poured over broken glass, smooth and dangerous and I want to drink it down until I drown.
I should be afraid of the strange man; should wonder how anyone could look so untouched by the hunger that’s killing everything else. I should ask who he is, where he’s come from, why he’s standing in my father’s ruined field like he’s the lord of the land.
But all I can do is stare.
He’s beautiful in a way that makes my chest ache, and his eyes catch what little light the morning offers, throwing it back like silver coins.
When he smiles, I forget what I was looking for in the dirt.
‘You’re wasting your time out here.’ He steps closer, and I smell something like cinnamon, like warmth and everything else I’ve been missing. ‘This ground won’t give you what you need.’
‘Then what will?’ The words escape before I can stop them, raw and desperate and too honest.
His smile widens. ‘Why don’t ya come with me and find out, a chroí?’
I know I shouldn’t go with him. I should think of Ma waiting for me, and remember practical things like shelter and safety and the fact that strange men don’t appear from nowhere in the middle of fields. But when he extends his hand, fingers long and pale and steady, I reach for it without hesitation.
The moment our skin touches, the world shifts, and turns.
I wake up in the field, mud caked to my skin, rain still falling. The cottage in the distance looks smaller than before, grey and lifeless and wrong. Mam will be waiting, but I can’t remember why that matters. Can’t remember anything but the taste of him, the warmth of his hand, the promise of a place where hunger doesn’t exist.
I’ll wait for him. I know he’ll come back because he must. Because I’ll die without him, because now that I’ve known him nothing else could ever make sense again.
It’s only natural for me to smooth my skirts and return to the earth. The dirt crumbles between my fingers, but I’m not looking for potatoes anymore.
I’m looking for him.
*
Oxford, England, 1944
They’re at their usual table by the window, voices carrying over the din of The Eagle and Child and blending with the smoke from their pipes. A fiddler plays a sorrowful tune in the front room.
I nurse my pint in the corner and pretend to read, but the words blur when all I can think about is the conversation I’m not part of. I’ve been coming here for three years now. Three years of watching them debate theology and magical fairy tales and the power of sub-creation, and I’ve never worked up the courage to approach.
Maybe tonight will be different. Maybe tonight I’ll finally cross the impossible distance between my table and theirs, gain their attention by contributing something worthwhile. The Celtic manuscripts I’ve been translating would surely interest John.
The rain starts up again as I’m working up my nerve. It drums against diamond-paned windows in a rhythm that matches my pulse. I down my drink and almost stand… but then I see him.
He is like a shadow given form as he emerges from the corridor, and everything fades in his presence: the Inklings, my manuscript, my pathetic scholarly ambitions. There’s only him, tall and graceful, moving through the pub like he owns everything in it. When his gaze finds mine, I feel the weight of centuries—of moonlight on still water and silver coins lost to the depths of a wishing well.
He’s too beautiful to be true, too graceful to exist in this world. His focus is locked on me and me alone, and no one reacts to his presence. No one other than me.
I know what he is, and deep down I already know that I’m doomed. I’ve spent years researching the stories, cataloguing the old wives’ tales, documenting the folklore and fables that warn of creatures like him. A gean cánach. The love-talker. A beautiful destroyer of lives who answers immeasurable cravings and leaves nothing but madness in his wake.
My knowledge should be armour.
Instead, it only makes the fall more thrilling.
He approaches my table and slides into the chair across from me without invitation. Up close, he’s even more impossible, and his presence changes the air of the pub, filling it with the taste of rain and longing and the kind of desire that consumes everything it touches.
‘Studying the old stories, are we?’ His voice carries Ireland wrapped in silk, and when he nods toward my manuscript, I realise I’ve been gripping it so hard my knuckles have gone white.
‘Research,’ I manage, though the word comes out strangled. ‘For my thesis.’
‘How scholarly.’ His smile is dangerous; his tone mocking. ‘And what have these hallowed halls taught you?’
Everything and nothing. That the stories can be real; that knowledge is useless against old magic; that I’m already lost, and we both know it.
‘That some things shouldn’t be studied.’ It’s a safe answer.
He laughs, low and rich, and extends his hand across the scarred wood. ‘Well then, m’boy. Perhaps you should stop reading and start living.’
I know better. I know exactly what he is and what touching him will cost. But knowledge means nothing when his fingers are so pale and perfect, when his eyes hold promises I’ve been waiting my whole life to hear. When the alternative is remaining in my lonely corner, watching other men live the life I’ll never be brave enough to claim for myself.
I take his hand.
They find me in my rooms six weeks later, surrounded by pages torn from every folklore text I own, the word ‘gean’ written in my blood across the walls. The other scholars shake their heads and speak quietly of the dangers of delving too deep.
But I’m not speaking anymore.
I’m only waiting for him to return to me.
*
Somewhere near you, now.
I used to keep their last words in a jar by my window.
But grief, it seems, is soluble in starlight, and dawn after dawn dissolved my trophies back into the air they came from. Words fade and blur together after centuries anyway, and what I treasure are the feelings beneath them. The raw, desperate need. How they break when they realise I’m not coming back.
It’s over for the boy from the pub. It ended this morning after three weeks of suffering. Respectable duration, really. Most make it only to day ten before seeking pills or a bridge or whatever mundane way they choose to forget me. He held on, white-knuckled and shaking, calling my name into empty rooms until his voice went hoarse. When he finally swallowed the bottle, I felt his end like warm whiskey sliding down my throat.
They’re all different, of course, all carrying their own memories and feelings. The desperation of a woman wasting away through famine differs from a soldier walking into no-man’s-land with my name as his prayer. And there have been so many. The poet, the baker, the priest, the whore. Centuries of beautiful, breakable things who thought they were the only person special enough to make me stay. I let them believe it because hope tastes better than despair, at least for a while. Because despair carries its own unique flavour. It’s rich and complex and satisfying in ways they’ll never understand, and I crave it just as they crave me.
I am what I am. A collector of moments, a harvester of hearts, and they give themselves so freely, these beautiful, fragile little things who crave so much.
Who am I to refuse such gifts?
The rain has started again, rapping like a heartbeat against the glass pane of the door. I open it and breathe in deep before reaching for my pipe.
Just around the corner, someone new is waiting to fall in love.
And I am ravenous.
Raised in the sweltering heat of Queensland, Alison dreams of snow-covered trees and cobblestone streets filled with languages she doesn’t understand.
A onetime travel writer with a history of slipping undetected across Balkan borders, she enjoys spinning tales of espionage woven with magic and distorting the idea of love into twisted cautionary fables.
