Fiction

If you cut open a cloud, the cross-section looks like a gigantic ant farm with an intricate network of tiny pathways. In this way each cloud in the sky is a city. In each unnamed cumulus metropolis, rainwater flows through these corridors like blood through veins. To us, the cloudlife of raindrops seems like it must be a gestational period, and in a way it is. The way that warm, dark cloudflesh surrounds and envelops rain in the sky is womblike. However, the life of a drop of rain inside a cloud is not the same as the mindless growth and development of a mammalian fetus. It is altogether more like school.

Citizenship and community are important to rain; after all, raindrops can literally merge with each other to become larger entities, though the base unit of the drop always retains control over itself. It is in puddles that rain shares information, and in the cloud-cities there are myriad recesses of varying size in which raindrops gather and learn. In one such classroom, drops are told that the collective Rain should always be valued above the individual droplet. In another, they learn of the cycle of rain: falling honorably and gracefully from clouds to replenish the Earth, then rising back to the clouds to fall again. In another they hear tales of the soil and seas that await them at the end of their fall, and in yet another they are told to be proud of their home-cloud, as there are many lesser clouds hovering in the sky. After a drop has learned its lesson, it separates from the teaching puddle and is whisked away by the streaming hallway to the next classroom. Such is the cloudlife of a drop of rain. Naturally, some take to it more than others.

When every drop has visited the majority of the countless classrooms in a cloud, the city becomes dark and heavy with their collective knowledge. New pathways are eroded, pathways that lead not to any classroom but to howling wind. The first to jump are the malcontents, the disbelievers, and those that just want to get it over with; the thrill-seekers; the zealots all too eager to begin their transformation. They drizzle down toward what is below while those left in the cloud make snide little jokes in their puddles. But before long the time for mass exodus comes, and the cloud is evacuated in dozens of somber processions.

Quite a lot about the nature of any raindrop can be learned if you simply watch the way it falls. Some show that they never completely believed in the cycle by the way they spread themselves flat, trying to fall as slowly as possible. On the other hand, you can tell a true believer by the way it shapes itself into a sleek bullet to get to its goal as quickly as possible. Others simply take pleasure in the fall, swooping rambunctiously around other drops, knowing that whatever happens will happen and so why worry? Their exuberance annoys some but is contagious to others. Some drops find another drop to merge with, and lessen the fear of the upcoming ground by sharing it. And some just fall, glistening globules, at peace with what they are and what they are to do. What none of them know, not the frightened nor the fanatical nor the playful nor the affectless, is that they are the last rainload of the last cloud, and what they fall toward has neither soil nor sea, but only concrete for miles and miles and hundreds of miles, the Earth a newly-paved parking lot for its satellite, the fantastically glamorous casino-moon.