A Good Soaking

It was raining. For the first time in months, dark clouds rolled in and expelled fat raindrops, the kind that drench anyone standing outside in the time it takes to say, “Uh oh, where’s my umbrella.”

The heat wave, and drought, had sucked the life out of everything in town. No one, nothing, was immune from it. People walked quickly, heads down, tolerating the hellish summer only as long as it took to get from one cool place to another. Despair seemed to radiate from every surface.

All around me on the sidewalk, people stood, smiling in the deluge. Prayer worked.

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Postscript: This was another exercise in Flash Fiction, directed, in particular, to the Three Word Wednesday blog.