Rain by Glenn Blakeslee

“Get in the car,” he says, but she doesn’t. Instead she stands where the cold double cone of the headlights cuts into the glittering rain, and gazes up at the tall buildings surrounding the car. In the glow from a hundred office suite windows she catches with her eye the virtual fall of a single raindrop, and matches its velocity as it tracks down all the storeys, dimples the surface of the gutter water, swirls and joins a billion other raindrops, and pushes and drops into the gaping chasm of the storm drain. In her mind’s eye the water gathers power from unseen inlets, challenges the brink and falls in force over parapets of black crowning rock, slithers in silence down dark watercourses, pools in unlit caverns where sightless salamanders and silverfish imperatrix reside in abiding silence, joins again and gathers and plummets in steam into the once brightly-burning ember at the core of the world…extinguishing it. “Get in the car!” he screams, but she won’t.

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