There Will Come Soft Rains by Lorenzo M. Garcia
“How much farther should we need to walk, Mister?” The boy had neither a hint of hope nor a lick of anything more than his question. His eyes—tucked tightly in line with his steps—watched as one foot crossed the other.
“How should I know that—just keep on with it. We’ve got the rest of our lives to sit back, so watch your feet and continue moving.”
The boy sighed; he had heard this response many times before. “Can I look up?” he asked. “I haven’t seen much past my feet for a few days.”
“No, you stay watching your feet… I’m worried you might fall.” The man’s eyes were a bashfully dark mix of purples and browns that fought one another for the stage. He kept a balance between them—tired or bruised was not something easily intuited from his shattered frame.
With a heave, he moved his gaze to see the boy: his head was stooped, and fevered strides of an unkempt oscillation kept him moving in line with the man’s own, much larger, steps. The boy’s clothes were a mix of ragged and new—brandishing brightly dulled colors and newly frayed lambs jumping from moon to moon in an eternal dreamland of threads.
The man opened his mouth to say something. He felt the air of the words leave his mouth without a sound.
He closed his parted lips.
And let the air from his lungs funnel out between a silent breath—the boy heard nothing. His small feet trailed beside, kicking at stones when he had the luck to find one loose from the road.
It had been days since the walk began. The man and boy started as one and continued as a melded being into the starlight of the cusp of yet another hill. Beauty and death receded behind them for only the man to see before opening up to another piece of the world, which may hold another future for the organisms walking the path.
A dark black cut through by yellow lines made up the entirety of the boy’s view. He had learned to count the steps between the checkered lines. His steps had begun to aim for the beginning of each new dash in hopes of gaining any semblance of entertainment. He tripped himself many times in chasing the untenable dream of hitting every notch of yellow, but he loved it, and those small streaks of color loved him. Their shine seemed to talk to him, even more, he believed, than the man next to him.
This sort of dance between conscious conversation and ephemeral speaking, with colors and lines, continued for a few more hours, and they walked more slowly in the wake of the setting sun.
But now, from somewhere off to the side, past the devastation, stood a wall blaring off on a tangent of dates. It screamed out in its automated voice, “Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is…”
Only the man could see it, though, as the boy was under strict orders of his own to watch his steps carefully without so much as a small peek at what, perhaps once, lay around them.
Far off, in the place of the singular wall, was a wall of neons, converging, enveloping every piece of rubble from the sky down, seeping into crevices with a greenly lit rain.
Steam rose from pockets of rubble as they slowly disappeared—layers of torrential char made their way into the air, wafting into the path of the two bodies.
“Today is August 5…” The preaching was cut short. The man turned his head to see for himself, one last time, what had been made of the talking wall.
It had melted.
Rivers of water and newly melted metal flowed from the wall’s stoop on its small hill. The silver-lit stream swallowed more as it tore its own path through the desolate ground. The neon wall of clouds had converged over a great distance in the last few hours.
It seemed, only for the man, though, as the boy had no recollection or idea of what lay beyond his road, that the small eye in which they walked was being slowly constricted. He could feel a tightness in his throat, a dryness on his tongue. Nothing seemed to shake this feeling—the feeling of being trapped inside a created hell.
“How are your legs?” He studdered a bit, possibly still riled from the scene. How the man wished to be as ignorant as the small boy to his right.
“They’re fine. They don’t hurt as much as they did,” he shrugged. “But I’m tired; I don’t know how much longer I can continue.”
The man watched the boy as he performed his somber ritual of smashing his left foot into the painted lines.
“Come here—I’ll throw you onto my back.” The man motioned toward the boy with his hands. The color against his eyes seemed nothing but frightening, but as the boy looked up, they seemed to be much warmer than the harsh black of asphalt.
“No looking,” the man said. “Keep your eyes closed, rest.” The boy complied without much of a fuss; nothing seemed better to him than his closed eyes and a moment of torpor.
Once the lambs of the boy’s shirt lay tightly nestled between his chest and the man’s back, they set off. Now, with one less pair of legs. It was an even more devastating silence for the man now. He dragged his own feet slightly more: partly because of the new weight, but anyone who knew anything of the man’s internal workings knew that he did this in an attempt not to feel alone. Though older, he felt fear, real fear. An almost tangible sense of futility lay atop the man and the boy.
The dragging feet eventually subsided as the boy filled the silence with his own snores. A flit of a smile crossed the man’s face, lingering for a moment; then, in the face of the insurmountable cloud behind him, it faded.
The eye of this storm, which followed him so closely, was a lonely thing. He felt no love from it. He didn’t feel like he was being protected as though the eye were a savior. It was a condescending love that he received from it. He felt that the eye cared less about his living and more about his struggle. If he could be watched from the clouds as a struggling deadman, then the powers above him would allow it to take place. If he could be killed and still give such a show, then there would be no bickering as to his life or death.
But his show could only be fully enacted in life, while suckling from the small safety of the eye. He could feel the pain of being swept away by the torrential corruption as he walked alongside its devouring path.
That was the process by which he believed the world was watching him. He felt the hilarity of his situation, and he understood a single fact: He would soon be unable to walk, and along with his fall, the boy would descend into the painful downpour.
The man’s feet began to burn at first light. He felt it was just a big joke by the world to leave the road unmelted, yet also leave enough of a chemical film covering the sleek black to burn through the soles of his shoes.
The singed skin and searing pain were nothing but another noise. The snores, heavy breaths, and growing daylight all faded for the man. His ears and eyes and nose and mouth had lost their touch—the world was muted to him. He clicked his lips, feeling the scrape of dried skin.
The world around him, in the night’s blindness, had awoken with such a profound beauty that the man felt obliged to stop. It seemed unreal to see such an elegant downpour covering the ruins of an unconcerned city. Not a soul was there to witness it but himself—the soft snores continued behind him as metallic corpses piled.
More rivers poured from the ruins, finally able to be seen with the rising of the sun. More molten metals mixed into swashes of neon water and charred wood.
The man took a step, then another, and down the asphalt he continued, a footbed of grinding road beneath him, flesh blistered. He left the boy’s serenity in peace, keeping his groans inside himself.
The eye continued to move, and with it came the man and boy, both following an uncertain path, both in the same situation, yet each believing in a different future. The man contemplated life and death; the boy dreamed of sheep; the singularly standing walls dreamed of nothing but proclaiming the day to be today.
As it always is with a new day, the singularly standing walls of houses chimed out in symphony: “Today is August 6, 2026, today is August 6, 2026, today is…”
They followed the rest of the city into the raucous river.
Both the man and boy lurched forward in a sudden halt. The man lost his breath as his throat tightened. The boy, unaware of what the man had seen, landed on his rear and stared at the man with confusion plastered across his face—eyes devoid of any wear and tear, simply innocent and unconcerned, questioning.
A full night had done wonders for the boy.
“Mister, what happened?” he asked, removing the rocks embossed lightly onto his hands.
It was a moment before the boy enjoyed a response. It seemed only moments for the boy, but the silence had aged the man past his autumn, and he now stood beaten and bruised. It was now clear that his own countenance had not been molded by simply a lack of rest—the world had come down.
Powers had played.
Everyone had lost.
And in trying to find his way, he now stood at the cusp of a great loss.
“Sit, son. Don’t look away from me. Look at me, alright?”
He was pleading with the boy.
Begging.
“Alright, Mister.” He rubbed the dust and rocks from the back of his shorts before standing up—eyes fixed on the man.
“Don’t look away.”
“I won’t,” responded the boy.
They stood in a standstill. The man covered what he had seen with his large back; he kept the boy locked away from fright. He removed a small gadget from his pocket with a furled hand. He reached out and laid a small silver trinket in the boy’s hands, which were now stretched out, excited to behold what he would be given.
A small metal rat—a playing rat.
“I didn’t know you had one of these!” the boy screamed. “Can I play with it?” he yelled. His smile was as wide as it could possibly be stretched across his face. The man smiled shyly at him. He was only betrayed by the bursting sadness stretching behind his eyes and into a large infinity.
“Here you go, son.” The man dropped the trinket into the boy’s hand and watched as the small child played with the silver rodent. His laughs were louder than the rushing currents or even the sun that beat down in midday. They were the most fruitful, innocent laughs. Had the man had a child, he would have wanted to hear these laughs every day of the boy’s childhood.
Then a small shot.
The boy fell with a smile on his face and a small twitch to his body. The small blood-soaked lambs continued their eternal jumps from moon to moon on the boy’s shirt.
The man fell to the floor; then, in a second commotion, his gun clattered to the floor alongside him. The six-bullet spindle that held his ammo lay empty, not a bullet left.
A single shot, a single bullet, now nothing was left.
He turned himself away from the boy, unable to see him without a wretched feeling filling him. His drowsiness was a saving grace, though. Had he been in perfect mind, the man was sure that he would have lost his rationale and been condemned to tears, but he was weak now, too weak to feel the weight of what he had just done.
The man turned around and looked up to see the clouds once more, just a few hundred feet away and closing. In front of him lay a cliff that fell many hundreds of meters until it slammed into a rocky coast, with protruding black rocks.
There was no path to take, not a step to attempt. It took some time for the clouds to creep up. In the moments before his appearance, he began to recite something he had heard many times in his own parlor. He had heard it repeated so many times in a place he called his home. He repeated after the automated voice in his head, “Sara Teasdale. As I recall, your favourite…
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;
Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone.”
Now the rain from the side of the city had reached the man, leaving him burned and withered as it touched his skin. Every drop was a mark that engorged itself with flesh before crying out and falling towards a deep abyss in the craggy shore.
He sat strewn and screaming and bleeding as his body boiled ever slowly in the soft rain. He soon fell and watched as his body was brought to be mixed into the cacophonous river of molten metal, charred wood, and his own wax-like flesh.
The eye snickered as it continued out to sea, leaving behind the man and boy who were soon indecipherable amidst the torrents.