When The Rain Came

At 2:08 today, water fell out of the sky.

My grandma said it was the end of the world; probably aliens dropping poison on us. She said you could tell there was somebody up in the sky hiding because of the thick, puffy grey stuff that covered the sky before the water came down. Neither of us had ever seen anything like it before. She told me to get out the aluminum and to seal up the windows before poisonous gasses could get inside. She told me to hurry; she called me a lazy slob.

I went outside and shut the door on her screeching. I stood with the water pelting down from the sky onto my head, and turned to stare at our apartment window where I knew my grandma was standing. She was probably cussing me out up there, but I couldn’t even see her because of the water coursing over the window, rippling and shifting like liquid glass. If it was poison, it was beautiful poison.

Maybe Grandma would be less quick to see disaster in this strange water fall if she had to produce double the water production for our household. The government required my grandmother and me to produce .131 liters of tears every day—the normal amount for a two-person family. But Grandma didn’t like crying. When I came to live with her two years ago, she said I could stay with her rent free (who charges rent to a fourteen year old orphan?) if I cried her allotment as well as mine. What could I do? I had nowhere else to go, and crying extra doesn’t seem so difficult two weeks after your parents die.

So I cried all our tears every day and took them down to the tear-collection station by 8PM in the evening. There our whole town’s tears would be de-salted, sanitized, and sent to the national reservoir where they would be used to water the nation’s crops.

I looked up, letting the water splash onto my face. Thousands of tiny, sparkling dots fell evenly all around me, appearing out of the grey nothingness above and hitting my face and the cars and the ground seconds later, too fast for me to see each drop. I could never cry so fast—there had to be several pounds of water already on the ground, already evenly distributed, and more of it was falling.

The rivers and lakes left over after the war provide just enough water for animals and humans, but the tear-water goes to our crops. We would never waste any of it on un-planted ground. I stared, amazed, as the red, cracked earth turned a mottled dark brown, and then there was muddy water filling up the cracks. Part of me didn’t like that, to be honest. It just seemed so wasteful. After the first few months, with Grandma it got a lot harder to cry double. I had to drink water all the time. Sometimes she’d not let me eat till I completed the day’s crying, and since there’s only so fast you can cry, I frequently don’t get to eat till after 8PM.

The water fell slower now, just a tiny sprinkle pattering on my wet face. I was soaked through and when I inhaled I smelled an earthy, rich smell. The water hung from the eaves and dripped single, diamond drops onto the bare soil. Glorious, reckless extravagance. My phone buzzed in my pocket. I pulled it out and read, “Public Service Notice: Tear collection for the city of Coaling canceled for today.”

I looked out to the east where the strange fluffy masses had broken up and the sun shone through. A knot of fear formed in my stomach—was this a freak event? Would it never happen again? Already I missed the pattering shower on my face. Far in the distance I saw another puffy thing, hanging over a mountain. The water wasn’t gone. It would be back. I wanted it to come back.

Next time I would come out and try to count the drops before they hit the ground, and I would jump in the tiny lakes that filled the holes and dips of our parking lot, and I would stare up into the sky until every inch of me was wet. I smiled extra big up at my grandma in the window, put the phone in my pocket and went inside.

#orphan #tears #ordinary #rain #shortstory #weather #fantasy