“The Day It Rained Stone” by Kathryn Kulpa

In her newest flash fiction, “The Day It Rained Stone,” Kathryn Kulpa entirely reinvents the contemporary genre of the coffee-shop story. In such a story, usually set in a diner or eatery, readers are gently treated to a light narrative, a humorous or illustrative slice-of-life moment. Instead, Kulpa stuns the reader with the horror of the mines and the generational echoes of grief. The result is a vivid but weighty story that honors the dead and counts the blessings of the living.  —Court Harler

Every day when I go in to work to pull espresso shots I see the picture on the wall at Tunnel House Coffee, men with pickaxes and miner’s caps. Men who built the tunnel. Great-Grandpa Chuck was one of those men. Charles Henry Walker was the name on his tombstone, d. 1934, but the old pictures in Grandma’s album have “Pop” or “Chuck” on them, in liquid brown ink, in old-time cursive writing. The men were up by dawn. Out on the mountain before the sky did more than pink the edge of the horizon. Great-Grandma packed his lunch, never fewer than two sandwiches in that heavy steel lunchbox, two hard-boiled eggs, salt and pepper wrapped in a twist of waxed paper, thick scones split with a thread, then sealed back together with a smear of honey butter, the way Grandma still fixes them. Wives, sometimes kids too, waving goodbye as their men disappeared into the mountain, into caverns of stone that grew bigger each week.

Every day, the blasting. Whistle blowing, once for caution, twice for all clear. Vibrations that went on so long you heard them even in stillness, your teeth rattling, fingers tapping out syncopated rhythm as you trailed off to sleep. Everybody knew fine china wasn’t safe on shelves. Everybody knew, when the men were in the tunnels, glasses would dance, lights would flicker, clean clothes would wear a topcoat of powder, like a girl going out for the evening.

The Dark Day was the one everyone remembered, even Grandma, and she wasn’t more than three. She says her bones remember. Still won’t drive through a tunnel, still won’t ride an elevator. Like my mother, with her fear of tight spaces. Like my nightmares of being buried alive. That day the blast rumbled on, too loud, too long. The day they blew the whistle three sharp shrieks, again and again. SOS. SOS. Dogs howled along, tails tucked low. The day of long night, they called it, as if the sun never rose, blocked by the haze of stone dust in the air. Ambulance horns, arOOga, arOOga, and bucket brigades for when fire hoses no longer reached, but it wasn’t smoke that blacked the sky, only stone. Only mountains of stone, blasted, crushed, turning a tunnel into a tomb, sealed forever, so that all they buried of Great-Grandpa Chuck was the wedding band he wouldn’t wear into the mountain, lest the initials on it get too dust-choked to read. That ring lay, gold under earth, and not far off Great-Grandpa lay, with two hundred other men, bone under stone, and when the old folks ride that tunnel they still take off their hats, still bend their heads and whisper a quiet blessing to the dead we all live with.

KATHRYN KULPA is the author of A Map of Lost Places (Gold Line Press) and For Every Tower, A Princess (Porkbelly Press). She was a 2025 Writer in Residence at Linden Place in Bristol, Rhode Island, and has stories in BULL, Flash Frog, Ghost Parachute, matchbook, and Your Impossible Voice.

Featured image by Nick Osipov, courtesy of Unsplash.