Fairy Tale: The Rain

Story Prompt:

Image credit:  grandfailure, licensed via Adobe Stock. Do not copy. 

When the rain started, the world was dry and hot. The weary plants surged upward at first, grateful, basking in the needed moisture. They turned green, smelled clean. Children splashed in the puddles happy, kicked water on their parents, who laughed.

But the sprinkly storms turned heavy. The heat became moist, like a laundry room. The rain no longer refreshed anyone; people stopped splashing playfully in puddles and instead, began to fill sandbags with mucky brown grit. The grit got into their teeth, their eyes, stained their clothing and began to fill everything.

After a while, the domesticated flowers drooped from too much water. Their leaves grew yellow, then brown at the edges, then, black and moldy, and finally, turned to mush.

It kept raining.

Vines dormant since the age of dinosaurs came out of hiding and started to grow again. Tiny green shoots, at first, but then they covered outbuildings, eclipsing the formerly square shapes, then the vines crept into the yards, the parking lots. Everywhere. Nothing had sharp edges anymore-- it was all soft, green, masses of tendrils.

The tendrils grabbed at children's ankles as they ran past, on their way through the downpour into the rapidly growing blurry in the landscape houses. The summer sun was never bright-- everything was dim, dark. Skies forgot how to be blue. 

These old/new vines had beautiful, giant flowers that smelled heavenly to the small birds and insects-- who hovered near until they were were snapped up, eaten by the flowers, slowly digested in slimey juices. The lucky survivors learned to stay away, hungry bellies empty.

Still, it rained.

People forgot what lawnmowers looked like, left them to rust in the yards. The gasoliney smelling machines began to look like old art projects as the vines covered them, turned them into topiary of an ancient world. New indoor lives were found, forgetting the heat of summer, the heat of lemonade and ice cream and beaches and dry sand that sticks to the backs of legs.

The rain did not stop.

It dribbled. Drizzled. Poured. Torrents came down and then became gushers. Ditches filled up, overflowed. Sidewalks became small rivers. Doghouses floated away, some with the dogs, forgotten, perched on top of them, howling.

New words were invented for the types of rain, 100 different ways to describe texture, smell, density of water.

And the water and green kept flowing, flowing, flowing, until people forgot the words for "dry" or "dusty" and even "desert." Forgot those places ever existed.

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Note: in this summer's outrageous heat, this feels like wishful thinking a bit, even with the slightly apocalyptic nature.....