The Last Rain

The Last Rain

The first time the city announced there might be rain, the whole block went out into the street just to look at the sky. It was habit more than hope. For ten years the sky had been a flat, chalky blue that made the buildings look like cardboard cutouts. The sun rose, burned, sank. Clouds were something you saw in old pictures, the kind with soft edges that looked like someone had painted them in afterward.

From my third floor window, I watched neighbors shade their eyes and squint upward. Scarves covered their mouths against the dust. A few had water vouchers tucked into their pockets, just in case the rules changed mid-miracle. The sky stayed empty.

On the community speaker, the recorded voice that reminded us to boil every cup of tap water said citizens should remain calm. There was no confirmation of atmospheric change at this time. Reports of incoming rainfall were being evaluated. It was always like that. Evaluated, then put away like a rumor that embarrassed the person who’d believed it.

By afternoon the heat settled over the building like a heavy lid. I lay on my mattress in the middle of the living room because it was the only spot where the fan could reach me. Even on the highest setting it only pushed hot air from one corner to another. My shirt stuck to my back. My tongue felt like paper.

There was a knock. Three short taps, one long. Marta from next door.

“Come in,” I called, though my voice barely made it to the door.

She slipped inside and shut it fast to keep the dust out. “You look terrible,” she said. “You’re really under the weather.”

“We’d need weather for that,” I said.

She carried a chipped glass. Inside, something clear sloshed.

“Sit up,” she said.

The room swam when I pushed myself upright. My head felt stuffed with cotton. The air in my own apartment tasted faintly sweet, like fruit left too long in a bowl, and I told myself it was just heat. Everything tasted like something now. The dust had flavors.

“You shouldn’t have brought that,” I said.

“We had a good allocation this week,” she said, as if saying it quickly could make it less of a gift.

“It’s too much.”

She ignored me and pressed the glass into my hands. “Drink.”

It wasn’t much. Two fingers of lukewarm water, faintly metallic, enough to make my throat ache with wanting more. I drank slowly, the way the posters taught us. Small sips, swish, swallow. Your body wanted to gulp, but that was the animal part you were supposed to beat into submission. When the glass was empty, I licked the rim without thinking, then felt ashamed, then laughed once, dry and cracked.

“Thank you,” I said.

“You’ve got a fever,” she said, pressing the back of her hand to my forehead. “Your face is shiny. You sure it’s not that mold again?”

“The mold’s gone,” I said. “The inspector cleared the building.”

Marta’s eyes moved, not to my face but to the seam in the floor where the boards had been ripped up and replaced with cheap panels. The new surface buckled slightly, like skin healing over a wound.

“They tore up half your living room,” she murmured, “then sealed it back up when they ran out of money.”

On the wall, the government screen flickered. A cartoon sun wore sunglasses. The crawl rattled through the same phrases as always.

WATER IS LIFE. USE IT WISELY. REPORT UNAUTHORIZED IRRIGATION.

“I’ll be fine,” I said. “I was out too long yesterday. The line at the depot wrapped around the block.”

“You should go to the clinic.”

“The clinic has a two day wait,” I said. “They’ll tell me I’m dehydrated and give me a pamphlet.”

“Sometimes they give drip bags.”

“Not to people like me.”

She didn’t argue. We both knew who got drips. You saw them sometimes, clear bags hanging in the windows of the towers uptown where the reclamation lines never failed and cooling systems hummed behind tinted glass.

“If it rains,” Marta said, smoothing the sheet as if she could smooth my luck too, “I’ll come get you. We’ll go on the roof so you can stick your head in the gutter like the boys.”

I pictured her twins, bare feet and elbows, lined up along the rusted edge with their mouths open, waiting to catch a drop. They’d never done it. It hadn’t rained since before they were born.

“I’ll be fine,” I said. “Go back before they burn the kitchen down.”

“You’re too stubborn,” she said, but her voice softened around it. “You always were.”

“That’s why you like me.”

“I like you because you remember clouds,” she said, almost tired. “I’m tired of feeling crazy when I tell the boys about them.”

“Clouds are real,” I said.

“Sure,” she said. “So’s the ocean. I saw that once too.”

She left.

The fan whined. A bead of sweat rolled from my temple into my ear. The ceiling had a crack shaped like a river, a pale line cutting through old paint. Sometimes, when the building shifted in the night, the crack made a tiny sound, like a fingernail dragged along plaster.

I slept.

When I opened my eyes again, it was darker, but not because the sun had set. The light had gone strange and heavy, as if the air itself had thickened. The fan had stopped. The silence woke me fully. You don’t realize how loud power is until it leaves. I pushed myself up. My whole body protested. The government screen on the wall was black. Even the little red standby light was out. The air felt different. Not cooler. Charged. Electric, like something gathering its courage.

Outside, someone shouted. Another voice answered. A wave of sound rolled up from the street, not words at first, just noise that sounded like joy. At the window, the sky was no longer a flat sheet. It had weight. A low ceiling of gray that moved.

Clouds.

Smeared and dark, stretched across the city like bruises.

“It’s raining!” someone shouted. “Look, look!”

For a second I thought I was still asleep, caught in a dream inside a dream. Then the smell hit me. It rose from the baked pavement in a slow wave. Not dust, not hot tar or garbage. Something else. Metal and stone and something green I didn’t have a name for. The smell of dry land getting ready for water.

A tear cut a cool line through the dust on my cheek. I hadn’t noticed I was crying.

The first drop hit the window. It left a dark mark that spread, then dried at the edges like a mistake correcting itself. My breath stopped.

Another drop followed, then another. Each impact had a tiny sound, too soft to hear alone, but together they made a hush against the glass.

I shoved the window open. Hot air rushed in, laced with that new scent.

Outside, the droplets were bigger. One hit my forearm, shockingly cool, then tracked to my wrist and fell, leaving a clean streak. Laughter rose from the street. Someone clapped. Someone whooped like they’d won something.

I leaned out until my shoulders were halfway through the opening. The rain found my face in tiny darts at first, then in steadier lines. It wasn’t the hard downpour from Marta’s stories, the kind where water beat so loud on the roof you couldn’t hear your own voice. It was light, hesitant, as if the sky had forgotten how.

“Do you see it?” a voice called.

Marta stood in the street, skirt plastered to her legs, hair clumping with wet. The twins danced around her, arms held out like they were catching coins, their mouths open in wordless laughter.

“I see it!” I yelled. My voice cracked.

“What’re you doing up there?” she shouted. “Come down!”

I thought about the stairs. About bones that felt hollow in the heat. About the chance the authorities would appear and declare the water unsafe, order us back inside, tell us to stop treating it like a blessing.

The rain traced a path down my neck into the collar of my shirt. My skin drank it.

“I’m coming,” I said.

The room tilted when I turned away from the window. The fan loomed like a dead flower. The floor rose to meet me. For a second the edges of my vision went black, as if someone had pinched the world shut.

I made it as far as the door. My hand closed on the knob and then something slipped inside my chest, a soft, internal click, as if someone had unclipped me from the day.

The last thing I heard was rain, louder now, and Marta’s voice shouting my name from somewhere far away.

###

When I woke, it was quiet. No street noise, no shouts, no rumble of depot trucks. No fan. No rain. For a moment I thought I’d dreamed all of it. The clouds. The drops. Marta in the street. The twins with their arms wide. Then I realized I was cold.

The mattress under me felt too firm. The sheet had a rougher weave. Something tugged at the crook of my arm when I tried to sit up. The air smelled like antiseptic and boiled linen, not dust. I opened my eyes.

A low stained ceiling. A curtain on a bent track. A metal pole with a clear bag of fluid. A tube into my arm.

“Oh,” a voice said. “There you are.”

A woman in a wrinkled uniform leaned over me, hair pulled back, dark circles under her eyes. A nurse.

“How are you feeling?” she asked.

My throat was raw. My tongue felt thick, but not with dryness. The air itself seemed heavy, damp with other people’s breath.

“Where am I?” I started, then coughed. The sound rattled in my chest and wouldn’t stop.

She held a mask over my nose and mouth. Cool vapor flowed in. The coughing eased.

“Don’t talk too much,” she said. “You came in bad. Fever. Lungs full of mold.”

“Everything feels wrong,” I managed.

“That’s the meds,” she said. “And the climate. No one feels right anymore.”

A sound pressed at the edge of my awareness. A constant roar, low and endless, like surf you couldn’t reach.

“What is that?” I asked.

She glanced at the window. “Water,” she said. “What else?”

“It rained,” I said. The words spilled out like I could still keep them. “It finally did. I was at the window. Marta was in the street with the boys. Everyone was cheering.”

Her mouth tightened, not quite a smile. “You’ve been here three days,” she said. “You were pulled out during the last collapse.”

“Collapse?”

“Your block slid,” she said. “The hillside gave out. Floodwater came in fast. They pulled you from a third-floor window that was already under.”

“That’s not right,” I said, and my hand clenched the sheet. “The building was dry. There was dust in the hall.”

“You had mushrooms growing out of your baseboards,” she said, flat. “Your lungs were already surrendering.”

She crossed to the window and rubbed a clear patch in the fogged glass. “Look.”

Outside, the world was water.

Rain sheeted down from a low, unbroken sky. It hit the roof opposite in pale lines and bounced in fine spray. The building’s bricks were slick with algae. Vines trailed from empty windows. Water ran in ropes along jury-rigged gutters and overflowed into barrels that bobbed in their own catch.

Beyond the roofline there were no streets. A broad, churning expanse covered what had been the city. Traffic lights stuck out like dead reeds. The tops of street signs poked through brown waves. A billboard leaned at an angle, half its letters gone, advertising a beach that no longer existed.

In the middle distance, rooftops formed a crowded island of tarps and cooking fires. Small boats moved between them, low and overloaded. Farther out, the husk of a high-rise loomed, lower floors swallowed, upper stories streaked black with mold.

The roar was wind pushing long stretches of water through the drowned grid, slapping concrete, grinding debris.

“This is the river?” I asked. “It flooded?”

“This is the river and the bay and the ocean,” she said. “Everything found its level.”

She let the curtain fall and checked my chart, as if this view belonged on a list of vitals.

“Your temperature’s finally under control,” she said. “You’re still under the weather, but you’re heading in the right direction.”

“Is Marta here?” I asked. “From my building. Two boys. She brought me water.”

A crease formed between her eyebrows.

“We’re still updating the lists,” she said carefully. “Some made it to the evacuation barges. Some didn’t. I can look for her name when my shift’s over.”

She did not say what list she meant.

“You stay put,” she added. “No heroics. Let the drip do its work. You’re safe up here.”

She patted my foot through the blanket and moved away.

Alone, I listened to the storm.

It wasn’t a tentative shower. There was no laughter in it. No one danced with their face to the sky. It was steady and grinding and indifferent, the sound of roads unmaking themselves, of foundations softening, of everything we’d built coming apart under water that did not stop falling and did not recede.

I tried to find the drought again in my mind. The empty blue sky. The posters about thirst. Marta’s boys making dragons out of dust devils because you had to make something out of nothing.

It slipped away, bleaching at the edges, like a photograph left in a sunny window. Maybe that was what fever did. Maybe it was what the world did too. It rewrote itself until the version you’d survived sounded impossible.

In its place was damp plaster, constant drip, the sour smell of wet fabric that never dried.

The nurse returned with a cup of chalky water laced with medicine and held it to my lips.

“Small sips,” she said. “You know the drill.”

I did. I drank like I was still rationing. Like the rules could keep holding if I followed them.

When she left, the room dimmed. Outside, the wind shifted and the rain on the roof changed pitch, a higher, meaner rattle.

I pulled myself up enough to look out again.

A boat passed close below, engine coughing. Four people huddled inside, ponchos flapping. They towed something behind them on a rope that floated and rolled. For a moment I thought it was another boat. Then it turned and I saw it was the roof of a house, shingles slick, chimney snapped off like a tooth.

On the metal table beside my bed, my phone lay facedown. When I turned it over, the screen lit weakly, cracked in one corner. A frozen notification sat there, the last thing that had come through before the power cut.

EXTREME RAINFALL WARNING. STAY INDOORS. AVOID LOW LYING AREAS.

I stared at it until the words stopped being words and became only shapes.

Then I opened my hand.

In my palm, stuck to the crease below my thumb, was a dark flake of dried dirt, the kind you could peel off with a fingernail. It was from my old window sill, the rim where the first drops had landed and made clean streaks through grime. Proof, I thought, and then the thought turned on itself. Proof of what, exactly. Of drought, or of dreaming.

I set the phone facedown again.

Outside, the flooded city stretched to the horizon. The storm showed no sign of tiring.

Inside, I lay back and let the sound of water fill my ears.

For a brief, treacherous second I tried to pretend the rain was still a miracle, that it would end the way a story ends, with streets drying and people laughing at themselves for believing the worst. That the clouds would empty and lift. That the city would return and my ceiling crack would go back to being only a crack.

The second passed.

The water kept falling.

I pulled the blanket up to my chin and watched the light fade. Between waking and sleep, I held on to one small dry place in my head, just big enough for a sun and a single, soft cloud, and a street full of people who still knew how to look up without flinching.

Outside the window, the drowned city shifted and sighed.

The rain went on.