Excerpts from Pnin, chapter four, by Vladimir Nabokov

It rained all the way. It was raining when he arrived at the Waindell terminal… Pnin suggested leaving the luggage and walking one block – if Victor was not afraid of the rain (it was pouring hard, and the asphalt glistened in the darkness, tarnlike, under large, noisy trees).

The guest room was full of the noise of the rain falling on fragrant branches in the framed blackness of the open window. On the desk lay a wrapped-up book and a ten-dollar bill… A young yawn distended Victor’s staunchly smiling mouth. With sympathy, with approval, with heartache Pnin looked at Liza yawning after one of those long happy parties at the Arbenins’ or the Polyanskis’ in Paris, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years ago.

It still rained. All the lights in the Sheppard house were out. The brook in the gully behind the garden, a trembling trickle most of the time, was tonight a loud torrent that tumbled over itself in its avid truckling to gravity, as it carried through corridors of beech and spruce last years leaves, and some leafless twigs, and a brand-new, unwanted soccer ball that had recently rolled into the water from the sloping lawn after Pnin disposed of it by defenestration. He had fallen asleep at last, despite the discomfort in his back, and in the course of one of those dreams that still haunt Russian fugitives…

On the sandy beach where Pnin was still pacing (his worried friend had gone home for a map), there appeared before him a set of approaching footprints, and he awoke with a gasp. His back hurt. It was now past four. The rain had stopped… Presently all were asleep again. It was a pity nobody saw the display in the empty street, where the auroral breeze wrinkled a large luminous puddle, making of the telephone wires reflected in it illegible lines of black zigzags.

‘Drown the Whole World in Rain’ is from Will Orchard’s new six-song EP, God’s Lonely Hands. ‘All money from purchases of the EP will be donated to the Yellowhammer Fund, which provides funding and resources for those in Alabama whose reproductive rights are threatened.’

Will Orchard’s music is available for download on Bandcamp. Visit his website, and follow Will Orchard (formerly known as LittleBoyBigHeadOnBike) on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Soundcloud, Spotify, and YouTube.