It rained all day and then the next day and then it rained for the next one hundred years. Sometimes it came down hard and other times, just a light mist. People got used to it. It was expected and normal, like the fact that, in the morning, there’d be air to breathe.

              People sunned in the rain. They swam and had parties, played ball, rode bikes, cooked out, drank wine and beer.  People made love in the rain, divorced in a downpour, washed their cars in a drizzle. 

              In dreams, people often imagined clear, sunny days. They imagined dry fields and lawns, trees swaying in warm sunshine, lakes and ponds as smooth as a sheet of glass.

              There were always a few in each town who couldn’t take it, who let the constant tapping on the roof and windows drive them nearly insane.  The suicide rate hovered around ten percent. Innovative prevention programs were being designed and implemented to try and lower the death rate substantially.

              Nearly every movie and TV program and painting incorporated images of the sun, specifically, images without rain.  People lived their entire lives praying for the rain to stop, if only for a couple of minutes, for the sun to shine down at last.  They dreamed of blue skies and complete silence.

              If and when the rain stopped, they knew it would signal the end of the world and they would stare up without being hit in the face, smiles on their dry cheeks and foreheads, praising God, hands raised.

– David James

Author’s Note: I would say I’m enamored by prose poems. After reading Russell Edson’s The Very Thing That Happens, I was hooked. In my first book, A Heart Out of This World (1984), I had four prose poems. It’s a genre that is not well defined or established so anything possible can still happen. There is a freedom in writing a short prose piece that is different from the freedom involved in writing a poem.