Alex Hildegarde was born in 1970, of mixed Welsh, French and German descent. He attended the local comprehensive, studying sciences for 'A' level. After watching by chance a school production of Chekhov's "The Seagull", he went back every night till the show closed, and ultimately applied to university to study English Literature. He graduated with a First from Oxford in 1992, and went on to study Comparative Literature at Toronto University, with a thesis charting Slavic Romantic influences in the West, and showing the debt authors like Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, George Bernard Shaw, Henry James and George Eliot owe to their Russian counterparts, Chekhov and Turgenev. Since 1994 Alex has worked as a freelance Software consultant. He lives in Edinburgh South, near the Meadows, with his wife Rebekah and 2 children, Tabitha and Alice. Alex has been writing actively since 1989, during which time he has produced 4 novels and several hundred short stories. His appearance on laurahird.com is his first fictional publication to date.

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RAIN

by
Alex Hildegarde

When the rain begins to fall against the side of the house in earnest, I go to the window, and it is then that the street as a whole also goes to its window side, so that everything slopes downward – everything, that is, except our many pairs of eyes, which busily cross the street in a kind of dance between the rain.

But, though we go quickly – instantaneously, in fact – we don’t arrive at that; we don’t arrive at us; nothing leaves the street to become anywhere else, not even the water around the drains, which, it’s clear, is fed from beneath.

At such times I find myself trying to show off a little to the girl across the way; I try to show off, but in such a way as not to be noticed, by standing in uncharacteristic poses and moving my legs definitively, as if I have resolved on a course of action I actually have no intention of pursuing. And at such times the girl over the way leans her cheek against her palm and supports her elbow on the sash, as if she tries to make out my intentions.

“I don’t know how long we’ll stay here,” I think, meeting her gaze: “It doesn’t have to be a long stay, this life, this bit of life.” Or perhaps I say to myself: “Even now, I’m only thinking an afterthought …” For somehow it makes everything more acceptable to say that nothing has been determined, that the evidence is incomplete or at best incidental, that everything can be refuted without effort. But what I really mean is that, when it rains, everything feels tedious, and the houses go on forever, until they are blotted out by the mist. When it rains and the girl is standing there, I feel lonely for us both, and powerless to help. And she looks back at me, not listening, as if to say: “Is this really how people spend their lives?”

© Alex Hildegarde

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ALEX'S TOP 5 QUOTES

"What can one ask people with words? And what is the value of an answer given in words instead of in the coin of one's entire life?"

- Sandor Marai

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"Everyone's memories are different, and they are condemned to the solitude of those memories as surely as they are to the solitude of their own death."

- Juan Jose Saer

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"A book for no one, at the end of a love without frontiers."

- Edmond Jabes

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"The books were opened, and I gazed into the visions of the night."

- Daniel

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"The written words bring death"

- 2 Corinthians 3

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