The Rain

The rain gathered in puddles. It was a slow drip from heavy clouds that hung low, sagging in the burden of their own weight. It splashed on shingled roofs and pattered on the roof of cars. It slid down gutters and funneled into the road, carrying away the leaves and leftover trash. The day had been gray from the beginning, hiding the light in a dull shroud, like a mourning. The grass and flowerbeds were lackluster, garden gnomes and flamingos lost their cuteness and became trite in the dreariness of the day. The town was closed in bad weather, taking the day to stay locked up and remain with doors shut. And through all this was just the steady, the constant, the fall of the rain.
Somewhere back in time this town must have been livable, with Welcome signs and blooming petunias in the bask of sun. Yet now it was just a remnant of happier days, wrapped in an eggshell of pitiful nostalgia. The rain that beat was hitting its very bones, wearing away at any of its remaining essence. This was a town lost, lost in the fall of the rain.
A car rolled by disturbing the rain that gathered in the streets with a whooshing slush. By now such a rain had flooded the streets and almost sat still as if nowhere else to go, trapped in the town much as the people were. The car passed boarded businesses and decaying artifacts of 1960’s construction. Graffiti was the newest decoration this town saw. Vandals and vigilantes were just a sad excuse of teenage rebellion as they wasted their youth in this town. The windshield wipers squeaked on the glass to push away the rain that fell, the rain that eternally fell. The rubber tires had the dull glimmer of passersby, of travelers on their way through. The car was too rich, still too clean, with the taint of a dealership that could never be local. It passed the main street hardly even noticing, passed the beaten up homes that laced the edges of town, and then escaped, escaped the force and the weight of the rain.
One small business still had a light on, but red letters spelled Closed. Someone fluttered inside, an out-of-focus phantom becoming more and more transparent through the constant hardship of daily life, as constant as the rain. The rain, that beat down his pathetically-built barrier to the outside world, that washed away his façade of a happy life, the rain made him bare. He moved inside, slowly, dragging his burden on the soles of his feet. The business was a sad entrepreneurship that this town knew well; it scraped at the line between success and failure. His figure moved one last time and the lights went off as if to hide in darkness from the rain.
A child walked down the street, head tucked down and hair stringy and wet. Tattered shoes fell into puddles that muddied her bare legs. The dress hung on her frail frame, muted and gray, like the flowers in the rain. At only seven she was wilting, the sum of generations past. She passed through school a victim of neglect, unable to move forward or upward due to the system's decay. Her dreams and spirit were flooded by the rain, saturated like dead-weight on her soul. The rain that covered her should have been a baptism, a cleansing, but not here, not in this town. The rain was washing her away, floating her down the gutter with all the other debris.
It, the stench, hung in the air. The rain was not cleansing; it just uncovered the town’s barest quality, and rotted it from the inside out. The boards on windows bent and swelled with the pressure of the rain. It warped and changed the shape of the town, washing away its affronts. Below the pressure and the course of the rain was an eerie quietness, a stillness beneath it all, as if time was holding still for just the rain to stop. The stale air rotted and pressed the lungs of the town with the cyclic, the continuous, never-ending soak and fall of rain.
I stood below the awning, sheltered from the drop of rain. It gathered and rolled off the edge of the shelter, interrupting the pattern of the fall of rain. The dampness had soaked beneath my clothes, but nothing compared to the weight that hung on the town. The town was lost in a sea of Biblical proportions, like a waiting disaster, Custard’s Last Stand. It uncovered the town revealing below the wasted efforts of all the men, the tragedy that befell the children. Here where the gutters backed up and the street flooded, like a dam breaking, was a release of all the tensions that held in so long, tensions that tried to be forgotten but could never be lost. This here is the town of broken dreams washed away by the rain that wouldn’t stop.
I am not trapped; I am not weighted by the soak and the burden of the rain. I am only the spectator in the shelter from the rain, waiting only for it to stop so that I can leave all this behind. I am not of this town, this place of age and decay. Here has the sun been lost for days in the heavy clouds and heavier minds. This is a town alone, isolated away from the success, left behind by the world, but never insulated, not even from the rain. It feels itself rotting, but is helpless to change. My passage through here is tainted as hungry eyes look onward. I’m slowed as I finally try to leave, slowed in the streets by the flood from the rain. I may leave, but I never truly escape this lost town, this decaying town, and the ever-constant, eternal fall of the rain.