“What’s happening?”
“Jeanie, look!”
“Come see, Sean!”
“It’s so dark out.”
“The air feels spooky.”
“Yeah, prickly-like.”
Tiny pearls of water began to appear on the outside of the classroom windows. The children crowded to them, mesmerized. The teacher, Ms. Green, pressed her fingertips to the glass and stared at its beading in wonderment. None of them had seen rain before, though they had spent their lives steeped in its mythos.
After thousands of years of human civilization, the earth was mostly desert. Its oil veins had all been cathetered. Rainforests had been deforested. Ice caps had melted. The globe had irrevocably warmed. Much of mankind died off; those who survived, adapted.
Occasionally, mists would come – a low, pregnant fog murmuring through midnight city streets or dark countrysides of rock, sand, succulent. Specialized devices siphoned the resultant dew, which lay winking on the ground like myriad tiny eyes. Sometimes lightening storms danced theatrically across the heavens. Every now and then, in certain locales, cumulonimbus clouds would form. Their towering bulbs and stark velum edges held nothing but hollow promises. Never, ever did it rain.
Just that morning, Ms. Green’s class had been writing poems about the fabled sky-water.
“Drops shine like silver dimes.”
“Precipitation is a celebration.”
“Through your eyes, rain soothes your heart.”
Amer, the quietest boy in school, recited this in a whisper.
“That’s dumb,” said Harry. “Makes no sense. Plus, it doesn’t rhyme.”
“Harry!” said Ms. Green. “Remember our talk? About kindness?”
Everybody picked on Amer because he had a gift few others possessed: he could cry. Human bodies had mutated to conserve water in maximal ways, and crying was too much of a luxury. But the capacity was still riding on a rare recessive gene somewhere, and little Amer had lucked into it. His fraternal twin, Amon – like everyone else at school – could not shed a single tear. So Amer got bullied, despite Amon’s attempts to protect him.
That morning, however, Amon had a doctor’s appointment, and when lunch came around, he wasn’t there to intervene on his brother’s behalf. Loudmouth Harry and a couple of his friends dragged Amer down to the dust-storm shelter in the school’s basement and locked him inside. Amer banged on the door and screamed, “Let me out, let me out!” But Harry and the others just laughed, then took the steps two at a time back up to the cafeteria. For several minutes Amer kept banging and calling. When he stopped, he was met with silence beyond the shelter door.
Class resumed, and a strange phenomenon began.
BOOM! BOOM!
Thunder exploded like the gods were on safari and one of them had just rifled down an elephant the size of Brazil. The students screeched and clamped their small hands over their ears.
“I’m afraid.”
“Ms. G, are we in danger?”
“Is the world ending?”
“Alright, kids. Let’s stay calm,” Ms. Green said, but her face had grown very wan.
Then the sky did something it hadn’t done for centuries: it began dumping its lovely wet innards over the baked expanse below.
“It’s rain! It’s rain!” shouted a child named Mark, and he shook his russet head in disbelief, and dashed out of the classroom, out of the building, into the dazzling new outside. His classmates and finally Ms. Green followed. At first they didn’t know how to breathe in air filled with so much water; they took tiny, choking breaths and giggled in dismay and delight. But after several minutes they were greedily gulping the sodden oxygen, thrilled at the silkiness that oozed down their eternally cracked, sand-coated throats. It smelled like paper… like creosote leaves, but richer. It sounded like a thousand drum solos overlapping. The children looked around. Cream and camel and gold had dissolved. A most bewitching green-blue-black coated the earth.
“How marvelous,” Ms. Green said to herself, palms upturned.
The children ran and ran and ran. They played tag, or catch, or hide-and-seek… but mostly they bent their faces up to the torrent and let that wetness coat them wholly. They laughed and splashed in the puddles already formed, kicked at the hard, dusty ground turning to mud and mush, relished the feeling of sopping clothing as it suctioned to their skin.
“It’s like a dream…”
“I know! I hope it lasts forever.”
Amon had returned from the doctor and was outside with the others, when suddenly he froze. “Where’s Amer?!” he yelled. “Has anyone seen Amer?” he yelled frantically.
The sky was already brightening. Thunderclouds were fracturing into looser lumps, their angry charcoal tones draining to indigo, their lightened masses loping towards the horizon. The downpour turned into an even falling, no longer delirious, then into a sporadic spitting.
The soaked children ignored Amon and continued to run about. No one thought to do anything like collect the rainwater – so abrupt and impossible was the event. As they felt the miracle drying up, saw the old hot fiendish rays splitting the clouds and searing the soggy ground so that steam began to rise from beneath their feet, they cried out.
“No! No!”
“It can’t be going already!”
“Ms. Green, it isn’t over yet, right?”
Amon, quelling a powerful urge to experience the rainstorm’s final embrace, rushed back inside to try and find his twin. He sped from room to room, calling his brother’s name, searching in closets, labs, stairwells, and at last the dust-storm shelter in the basement. Amer was huddled in a corner; as Amon burst in, he looked up, his cheeks extravagantly tearstained. Without a word Amon grabbed his hand, yanked him to standing, and pulled him upstairs and out of doors as quickly as their short legs allowed.
“What… What happened?” Amer stuttered as he gazed around in astonishment.
Their sun was back, in all of its white, desiccated malevolence. Shreds of sapphire cloud hung motionless above them. All surfaces glistened, and the air carried a mirage-like freshness. The ground was steaming. The world seemed alien.
Amer looked from one drenched classmate to another, and he had never seen anything remotely like it.
“It rained?” he asked his twin, eyes round as the desert moon.
“It rained,” Amon said.
Amon put his forehead to his brother’s, and gripped his brother’s thin arms, and closed his eyes… and tried to transfer the feeling to him. Rain pelting on the head, rivuleting down the chin and the back of the neck, the coldness, the crisp lush odor, the glory of liquid skies. Normally they were able to commune in such a way. This time, the sensations were too just novel, too foreign.
Amer lifted his forehead from Amon’s. He bent down slowly and put his hands to the earth, palms and fingertips clawing futilely the fast-disappearing dampness.
“My heart is a husk,” Amer said.
“I’m so sorry,” said Amon. He looked down, overwhelmed with distress, and heaved a dry sob.
But Amer didn’t cry. In fact, from that day on, he never cried again.
[Inspired by / As a sort of reversal of “All Summer in a Day” by Ray Bradbury]
Posted in FICTION, flash
Tags: children, climate change, desert, dialogue, dystopian, global warming, rain, ray bradbury, sci fi
zokomonium 