Prayers for Rain
A Halls of Pandemonium Bonus Prompt #1 Response
The radio drifted between stations while he ate. Most nights there was at least one preacher somewhere out beyond the hills, some cracked desert voice talking about repentance or water rights or the end of the country. Tonight, there was only static rolling softly through the cabin. Eli turned the dial twice more before giving up and setting the radio beside his plate.
Outside, the desert still held the day’s heat. The windows were open, but no air moved through them. Dust had settled into the corners of the kitchen again sometime during the afternoon, thin red powder gathering along the sill above the sink and across the warped boards near the back door. It happened every day now. He swept. The dust came back. It always came back.
The stew simmered thick in the pot between his knees while the propane lantern hissed softly on the table beside him. Rabbit, beans, the last of the canned tomatoes he’d traded for down in Ransom three weeks earlier. The tomatoes tasted faintly metallic, but everything did lately. Water from the cistern. Coffee. Bread. Even the air some mornings.
He ate slowly while the static breathed beside him.
Five years without rain. Not five years without storms. Clouds would gather out over the western flats in towering blue-black walls while heat lightning crawled silently through them after dark. The smell would come first then. Dry ozone. Damp earth that didn’t exist yet. Eli would stand out on the porch listening for thunder that never arrived while the sky tore itself apart above the mesas without spilling a single drop.
Eventually even that stopped happening. Now the sky mostly stayed empty.
People talked about the drought like it had begun suddenly, but Eli remembered the way it really happened. Little absences first. Creeks drying into mud. Wells deepening another ten feet every year. Ranchers selling off cattle because feed and water cost more than the animals themselves. Then came the dust storms. Then the reservoir restrictions. Then the fights in grocery stores whenever shipments came late.
After that the cities started getting louder. Not literally at first. The noise had always been there. Traffic. Sirens. Advertisements screaming from every screen mounted high enough to catch an eye. What changed was the pressure of it. Like everybody had begun grinding their teeth at the same time. Every conversation carried exhaustion underneath it. Every gas station. Every checkout line. Every apartment wall thin enough to hear strangers arguing through at three in the morning.
He lasted another year in Dallas before finally leaving. He sold the condo. Bought eighty acres nobody wanted four hours north of Las Vegas, a place where the ground cracked open every summer like old pottery. He put in solar panels and dug a cistern. Learned how to repair wind rot and snake fencing and propane lines. The silence out here felt strange at first. Then necessary. Eventually it became the only thing that allowed him to sleep.
Still, he missed the rain. He missed waking at night to hear it moving across rooftops and pavement. Missed the smell rising off hot asphalt after summer storms. Missed the way the whole world seemed to soften under it for a little while. Rain made people quieter. Kinder sometimes.
The static shifted abruptly. For half a second a voice pushed through the interference in a burst of garbled syllables before disappearing again beneath white noise.
Eli glanced toward the radio.
“Wind’s wrong tonight,” he muttered.
The signal towers out here were unreliable even on good evenings. Storm fronts sometimes bent transmissions strange ways across the flats. Solar interference too. Last summer the radio picked up a baseball game from Utah for nearly an hour before dissolving into static again.
He took another bite of stew and looked out the kitchen window.
The horizon carried an odd color tonight. Vegas sat far enough south that the city glow usually appeared only as a faint pale wash against the sky after dark, barely visible beyond the distant hills. On clear evenings he could still make out the Luxor beam cutting upward through the dark in a thin white column sharp enough to look unreal, like somebody had driven a glowing nail straight through the night and left it there. Tonight, the light looked deeper somehow. Orange instead of white.
Wildfire, maybe, between him and Vegas. Wouldn’t have been unusual this time of year.
The static crackled sharply again. Then came the sound against the roof.
Soft enough at first that Eli thought something had brushed the cabin. A branch maybe. Another slow tap followed several seconds later. Then another. Irregular. Hollow.
He set the bowl aside slowly. For a moment he simply listened.
The sound spread gradually across the metal roof overhead in scattered uneven impacts. The porch creaked softly outside as cooler air moved against the cabin walls. Somewhere beyond the dark windows came the faint dry smell of dust lifting from the earth.
Eli stood before he realized he was smiling.
“No shit,” he whispered.
The back door groaned open beneath his hand. Warm air rolled immediately across his face carrying a smell he had not breathed in half a decade. Not quite petrichor. Close enough that his chest tightened anyway. The porch boards creaked beneath his boots while the rain continued falling softly through the darkness beyond the lantern light.
For several seconds he simply stood there listening to it. The sound filled the valley in delicate uneven waves. Rain striking dead grass. Rain ticking softly against the rusted water barrels beside the fence. Rain moving through dust so dry it almost seemed to sigh beneath it.
He stepped off the porch into the yard. The drops struck warm against his face.
Heavy too. Thicker than rain should have been somehow. He closed his eyes anyway and let it soak through his shirt while the desert drank around him for the first time in years.
The smell reached him a few moments later. Not earth, burned metal. Something sharp and chemical buried beneath the rainwater.
Eli opened his eyes slowly. The orange glow on the horizon had spread higher into the clouds now, stacking upward in dark orange layers above the southern hills. The rain ran black beneath the porch light. He lifted one hand absently to wipe water from his mouth and stopped.
Black residue coated his fingers. For a long moment he stared at it without moving.
Then he looked back toward the horizon. The rain continued falling softly around him while distant light pulsed silently beyond the hills where Vegas used to be.
Eli exhaled through his nose.
“Jesus,” he murmured, though there was no real surprise left in the word.
The radio inside the cabin had gone completely silent now.
He looked down at the black water threading slowly across the back of his hand before the rain washed it away again. Warm drops slid through his beard and down the sides of his neck carrying the faint taste of soot across his lips.
Black rain.
He had seen photographs once. Hiroshima maybe. Nagasaki. Children standing beneath umbrellas stained dark as oil while ash fell from the sky around them.
There was nowhere to go anyway. Even if the truck started. Even if the roads stayed open. The rain had already reached him. The wind had carried the dead this far east and laid them across the desert in warm black rain. San Francisco. Sacramento, maybe.
Eli walked back onto the porch and lowered himself into the old wooden chair beside the door. The rain drummed steadily now across the roof overhead while the sick water collected in the dead yard below, turning the dust dark beneath the weak yellow glow of the lantern inside the cabin.
Beyond the hills, the southern sky continued burning. He leaned back slowly and closed his eyes. It had been five years since the last storm.
He figured this would probably be the last one too.
This is a response to bonus prompt #1 of Bradley Ramsey’s “Halls of Pandemonium” writing event. Although I’m not participating in the scoring portion of the event (you know, since I, uh… wrote the backend for it), likes, comments and restacks will (maybe) help us achieve community goals and spread the word about the challenge.