Something in the Rain

My mother told me there was something in the rain. 

Water? I’d inquired, just to be annoying. Our water came from the pipes. We relied on the city reservoir, like most people, so no rain runoff was involved. Apparently the reservoir purifiers had broken down, or something. Mom had heard about it and relayed it to me a while ago, but I hadn’t been paying much attention.

Mom said she liked my snark, then sighed, and said, Well. 

She repeated that she liked my snark, but that there was something in the rain. So don’t go out in it.

She didn’t let me leave the house until the puddles finished drying, and even then, I was supposed to be careful that the soaked trees didn’t drip down on me.

* * *

It hadn’t always been like this. In the books I read, kids played in the rain. Desperate maidens kissed vindicated lovers under spouting heavens. People swam in lakes, and dying men, floating upon the oceans, reached up for life-bringing showers. I even saw a picture book once where a pretty little girl in a yellow raincoat splashed through a puddle, no umbrella in sight. Mom confiscated the book when she realized that I, being young and stupid, might want to imitate the little girl. 

But I guess I didn’t care much. The sunshine and I were old friends, having known each other all my life. And I loved the feeling of warm sunny sand under my feet, even if the brown grass stubs sometimes made it prickly and painful to walk. I liked playing baseball with Dad in the sand — racing across the field to beat him to the plate — him scooping me up and taking me home when the ground became too hot for my tender little feet. ‘Cause that’s what he called me. Tenderfoot. When we came home, he made jokes that he was a tenderfoot, too, since Mom had to wrap his feet in bandages to help his little burns heal. 

His and my boots were starting to be thin, he explained to me. And it was a little tough to get new ones.

He went eventually to purchase new pairs, and I was the lucky sucker that got to tag along. It was a cloudy day, but no rain was forecast. Mom stayed home to get some gardening in while the air was cool. The car had ceased to work long ago, despite all Dad’s ministrations, so we walked the mile to the bus stop and then hitched a ride with the grizzly old bus driver. He and boots’ll cost us an arm and a leg, Dad told me with a wink, but no tenderfeet! 

It was easy to smile at that, but not laugh, ‘cause the bus scared me. I’d only been on it a few times before. The spooky driver — the red posters — our sun-dried fellow passengers — the massive black letters graffitied along the ceiling that I could read, but did not understand, that I thought said THE END OF THE WORLD COMES SLOWER THAN YOU THINK but that didn’t make sense — all this combined to scare me. So Dad let me sit on his lap. I was just seven, I was just seven, I was just seven.

It started to rain while we were in the store. And Dad had spent all his money on boots. No money to motivate the bus to come pick us up. In the interim, I became bored. I remember walking to the door. 

The shopkeeper was yelling. I didn‘t realize she was talking to me!

The rain stung my skin like holy hellfire. The pain was so intense the recollection of it makes me quake now, years and years later. I was a baby! I recall falling over, which just gave the rain access to my neck, my collar, trickling down my stomach. 

Dad ran outside and grabbed me. He pulled his threadbare jacket over me, then protected the jacket with his own body. 

The rain left smoking black spots on the porch roof, under which the shopkeeper watched.

Dad was outside for about two minutes, rescuing me.

* * *

When I was fifteen, I asked what was in the rain. Mom waffled in her response. She finally said the subject wasn’t worth dwelling on. Nor was it worth dwelling on what the world used to be like.

That grabbed my attention. I demanded she tell me. It was a secret she’d been keeping my whole life, so maybe I raised my voice a little. My conscience twinged only when I saw the tears brimming in her eyes.

She pulled me closer to her, and tried to get me to sit in her lap. I think she'd forgotten I was a teenager.

I sat beside her instead, and she produced that old picture book again, and pointed out the space behind the little girl in the yellow raincoat.

“See,” she said. “Know what this is?”

“Uh,” I said. “Water?”

“What color is water, dear?”

“Green,” I explained. “Sometimes blue. Green around here, although it’s blue in the book.”

She drew a finger slowly across the illustration.

“This is grass.”

“Grass is brown.”

“Grass is green.”

“Um, Mom.”

“Grass is green. And there’s a great deal of it. Around here, there was more grass than sand, and almost as much water as grass. And there were miles and miles of green, long, waving grass.”

 She paused, eyes faraway, as if she was thinking of Dad. “We had a mower to keep our lawn neat.”

I was confused, on more than one point, so I went with the most obvious.

“What’s a lawnmower?” 

She looked at me blankly.

“A lawn is the grass around a house,” she said. “And we had too much grass. Had to cut it with a clipper that we called the lawnmower. Dad and I took turns. The grass was very . . . pervasive.”

“You’re kidding, Mom.”

A cloud seemed to have passed over the sun, because my mom’s face had grown gray and cold. 

“This isn’t an artistic fantasy, Emily,” she said, pointing to the book. “This is what the world used to look like. Grass was green, and it was everywhere. The waters were more blue than green. The sand was firm, brown dirt, and it was full of worms and beetles and . . . and plants and flowers and stuff.”

I had only ever seen flowers in drawings. I asked her, unsteadily, what she was talking about. And why she was crying again. Her tears pattered against the paper even as the rain began to scorch our roof. 

* * *

When the end of the world comes, it comes slowly, and in an ugly way. 

There’s no nobility left to achieve. No heroes. No revolutions. No diseases, no wildfires, nothing to cure or put out or fix. No hope of salvation. I guess there’d been a brief time, before the knowledge to create the proper technology had passed out of existence, and before the outdoors had started trying to kill us, when humanity could’ve fixed the environment. Or just built rocket ships. We could’ve fled Earth, gone maybe to the abandoned Martian settlement. Maybe have made the International Space Station our refugee shelter. Or we could’ve just sailed away, past the sun, the planets, the asteroids, into the glittering, gleaming, endless depth of space. 

The view would’ve been better — and at least there would’ve been a chance for survival. 

And I could’ve been born among the stars, rather than on a planet in its death throes.

Like I said: no heroes were left. No doctors, no politicians, no grocers, no truck drivers, no athletes, no parents left on the whole stinking planet by the time I turned twenty-five. There was no need for any of them. We were all going to die soon enough, anyway. In regards to parenthood, to children — well, I think most people ended up finding that the flavor went out of sex with the thought of meeting our Maker in the next couple years — or weeks, months, whatever.

(Yes, the preachers survived. Higher demand than ever. Writing still isn't considered a valuable skill, yet here I sit.)

I stayed in the burned little house, so I was there when the brown grass was swallowed up by the sand, just like it never existed. I didn't notice the transition, but I sure noticed when it was finished. I stood on the porch with a broken pencil and a charred notebook, and wrote down that this must've been the way Mom felt, when the green grass disappeared.

Mom had said it was once thick and lush, pervasive, everywhere.

Mom had said the sun used to be yellow, and clouds were once puffy and white. She’d told me in a low voice that the trees were once thick with leaves. And snow would sometimes fall, and it was cold, colder than anything I’d ever known, and it was made of an excess of clear, sparkling water. She’d described flowers in bloom, and bees buzzing; dogs as a kind of pet and babies as something desirable. She told me kids used to jump in rain puddles. She said that dads didn’t die when the rain burned their eyes, their mouths, their skin, just ‘cause they were trying to protect the life of their little baby girl.

* * *

When the end of the world comes, it comes not with a cry for help, nor with indignation, inspiration, or escape. It comes by degrees; a timer winding effortlessly and steadfastly away. The world ends most slowly, leaving you with plenty of time to wonder. I, personally, used to wonder if there was a way we could’ve saved the world, once. Now I wonder if I should even care.