The day it rained, every parched piece of living material was crying out with such thirst that it was almost audible. Everything was crisped, seared, overdone. Moisture was nothing but a distant piece of nostalgia.

The day it rained, the grass had gone past yellow and into a sharply scented state of decay. The children next door tried to fry an egg on the sidewalk and they actually succeeded. The day it rained, anyone who believed in life and love and running water had already packed their things and moved out of town. Those who remained were the tough, the weathered, and those who simply had no other place to go.

The cloud that was spotted near the edge of town became somewhat of a legend. First, people told it like it was, a small, haggard, puny sort of cloud. The people who weren’t there turned it into a massive thunderhead, and those who heard tell of it years later heard that it was nearly a hurricane.

The rain brought life back into town on the swirling, drizzling, flowing wings of water.