God's Wrath

It was a dark and stormy night. As they all were. Valerie walked as fast as her feet would allow her. She had given up on trying to protect her clothes from the furious raindrops that soaked her. After all, she walked home in that same weather every day. Over time, she had finally come to terms with the fact that there was no escaping it.

The cold was there to stay.

When it first started raining on that dreaded Tuesday afternoon, Valerie had tried to outrun it. She had been naive. Saw the drop as nothing more than an inconvenience that would not prevent her from making it home dry and warm. Of course, she had failed miserably and learned that a flimsy spring coat couldn’t shield her from the cold. No matter how much she tried.

The next day, she’d been prepared and had brought her huge, hot pink umbrella to work, along with the thickest pair of gloves she owned and a puffy jacket. It didn’t change a thing. The wind, along with the intensity of the rain, made it impossible to stay safe. That day, Valerie had learned a valuable lesson: umbrellas are heavy. With the wind blowing as it did, it was impossible to carry one with ease. So, she desisted with that idea too.

It was her against the raindrops now.

Two weeks in, the storm hadn’t resided in the slightest. All the citizens had already gotten used to being wet and cold, Valerie included. Precautions had been taken after a few days of incessant rain. Everywhere you went, heaters and dry shirts were waiting for you. It was a silly solution but it lifted up the morale. For the whole week, people seemed content, their immediate problem solved. Oblivious, everyone tried to ignore the biggest concern.

When was it going to stop? Or, better yet, was it ever going to?

Valerie kept walking, focused on overlooking everything wrong. Following her fellow citizens' example, she did her best to act like this was just a case of bad weather. She decided to forget she lived in Denver, where rain was a luxury. Thinking about it only made it worse.

“God is angry because we’ve been bad!” A man with a grey beard and crazy eyes shook a bell as he yelled, trying to gain the citizens’ attention. “Just like Noah’s, this flood is here to stay! God is punishing us for our sins. We need to make amends and apologize for the atrocities we’ve done if we want to survive God’s wrath.”

Valerie let out a dry laugh under her breathe as she heard his words. These days, in every corner, there was a crazy fanatic, convinced that the rain was God’s doing. They seemed to forget climate change had been a threat for decades now. One of her coworkers had taken it upon himself to explain that rain’s only purpose was to drown every single member of the LGBTQ+ community. The day before, a group of teenagers had asked her for money to build a bunker to hide in until God himself descended.

God’s Wrath, they called it. As if the human emotion wasn’t dangerous enough, they had to add an all-mighty being to the equation. And, though she tried to take it with humor, Valerie couldn’t help but be concerned. How was humanity supposed to survive this with people talking about it like an inevitability?

After what seemed like hours, the woman finally arrived at her apartment. She rushed straight to the shower, stripping out of her clothes before she even reached the bathroom. With hot water soaking her chilled bones, she felt content for the first time. Her aching feet screamed in joy as the drop of water reached them. Valerie realized with joy that her fingers, numb with cold, were coming back to life.

Dressed and dry for the first time in hours, Valerie went to her mother’s room to check on her as she always did after work. She walked in expecting her to find her knitting yet another sweater to shield the could. Maybe even reading a book if she had run out of wool. Instead, she came face to face with a hysterical old woman, surrounded by chunks of wood and holding a hammer. Valerie sped up her pace, jogging to her mother.

“What are you doing?” She asked wide-eyed. With as much gentleness as she could gather, Valerie took the hammer out of her mother’s trembling hands. She placed it on the nightstand before turning back to the woman in front of her. “Where did you get this? You could’ve hurt yourself.”

Her mother didn’t react. She didn’t even spare her daughter a glance before crouching to touch the wood scattered on the floor. She went for a long piece that looked suspiciously like one of the chairs in Fall’s dining room.

“Following God’s order,” she answered deadpan. “You should too, dear. We need to save ourselves.”

“What?” The happiness brought by her hot shower and fuzzy socks was gone. It was replaced by fear for this was the only thing that was missing to make up the worst-case scenario.

“People had been so bad for so long. He’s angry. I understand it now. But He’s giving me, us, a chance to escape the fate of the human race and live, just like Noah. Sweetheart, I’m going to save us.” Her eyes lit up as she looked at her daughter for the first time.

“What are you even talking about?” A wave of disbelief went through Valerie’s body. She clenched her fist to physically stop herself from shaking some sense into her mother. “You want to build an ark?”

“To escape His wrath, we must follow His orders. Don’t you get it? I’m doing this for you, Valerie. So you get a chance to live as He wants us to, in a world without sin.”

“You’re going mad.”

Fall grabbed the hammer and walked out of the room. She couldn’t bear hearing her mom, with the manic glint in her eyes, anymore. The walls seemed to be closing in on her. Valerie felt her chest tighten and forced herself to inhale as deep as she could. All he could manage was a shaky breath.

She grabbed a coat and went out the front door. She needed to get out, away from her mother’s ideas. What can you do when the madness has reached the insides of your home?

She walked fast, avoiding any talk about God and this second Noah’s ark. What Valeria had perceived as a silly group of people before was no more. Instead, it was beginning to grow into the majority of the Denver population. It seemed like there wasn’t a person left that didn’t believe this was a Godly punishment straight out of the Bible.

Valerie tried to clear her head, forcing herself to think about her next step. It was hard, with the weight pressing down her chest the way it was. The situation was too much. She could ignore some idiots walking around babbling about the end of the world. But battling her mother was too much.

She could not win.

And what can you do, when sanity seems to go out of style?

Adapt or die.

Valerie looked at the sky. The clouds seemed to get darker. Maybe this was indeed God’s wrath. And part of the punishment was making Valerie watch everyone lose their minds until she joined the crowd and lost it too.