3 rainy days: 1994

“Any moment now.”

That’s what my brother used to say every time it poured.
And every time he said it, I’d let out a sigh and shake my head.

We had just seen Jurassic Park and since then, my brother would peek out the window, screaming at me to come quickly lest I miss it.

‘It’ being a full-sized male Tyrannosaurus Rex stomping through our neighbourhood, broad-siding cars as it went, setting off alarms, clipping the branches off trees with its giant bulk, and – my brother predicted – stopping momentarily to peer into our house with a calculating reptilian eye.

“They’re not reptiles," my brother would hasten to correct me.
"Reptiles are poikiothermic, which means they can’t generate their own body heat. Dinosaurs were homeothermic. We know that now from fossil evidence showing hearts capable of pumping….” And so on and so forth. My brother’s delusions were nothing if not detailed, fuelled by a rich diet of National Geographic articles and thick scholarly books by dinosaur paleontologists.

Initially, I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, whatever.”
This upset him greatly.
He would give me this look and scream “You don’t believe! That’s why it won’t come! You have to believe!” Then he would storm upstairs to his room, slamming the door.

My brother however, is very forgiving.
And the way I thought he was more than a little sad for believing, I think he thought I was more than a little sad for not.

So.

When it rained something fierce, he would again shout frantically, arms flailing, “Quick! Quick!” He would move the curtain open just a seam, just a peephole’s width, and say it:

“Any moment now.”

And then a funny thing happened.
I started coming forward. Looking out into the rain.

Even today, when it pours, I look at skyscrapers from my place in the gridlock.
I look out from my house, hiding behind the curtain.
And I find myself keeping still.
Cos that’s what they said in the movie.
They can’t see you if you keep real still.