Rain?
I don’t mind
The sun burned down from heaven onto the vast, white wastes, and the aqueous stone liquefied into cold, blue lava. The deep blue lava consumed the sun’s fire, and the fire burned through the lava, washing through in warm currents of blue flame, liquefying more and more of the frozen wastes. This it did until the entire earth was awash in blue, with hot spots spattering and raining the lava onto the land, sometimes cooling and hardening—sometimes streaming down landscapes back to the blue lava sea, or pooling up into seas on the land.
A warm, Hawaiian breeze blew across the surface of the great fog.
Deep under that placid lake surface, at the bottom of the fishless, stagnant white murk, Armen’s child-form lay sleeping under cloth, dreaming of koi fingerlings, slowly maturing into their reds, oranges, and blacks—flowing through ponds like aqueous flames.
The rain punctured the pond surface, echoing the pattering on the roof over Armen’s head. It bounded off the streets and the leaves of trees, and it filled the canals, and the canals slipped over the levees and filled the land.
"Flood, San Joaquin Valley" - Pablo Ruiz
The rain puddled up around the corners of baseball diamonds, along the trails that cut through the remnants of fields, and randomly in supermarket parking lots. It puddled against curbs, and then it puddled against storm drains. It pressed against cellar windows, and trickled around the panes. Rivulets crept through the dusty earth in the crawlspace.
In the mountains, the rain plunged into the grassy slopes, the chaparral, the forests, and struck the rotting stone. At higher elevations, the hot rain pelted the snow, its energized molecules bombarding their sleeping kin like an army of crazed ants, pulverizing and liquefying the vast, white blanket. Slush streams flowed into brooks, brooks into rivers, rivers over spillways, into canals, and over levees.
Puddles fed into puddles and became ponds. Ponds fed into floodplains that fed into canals. Canals filled and levees were compromised. Koi ponds were appropriated into the great sheet of water. The koi arose from their sleep in the bottoms, following the flood into the resurrected lake.
Armen sprang up from his dreams, and leapt out of bed to look out his bedroom window. The earth had become sea and arisen, and it was rippling and reflecting in the dim light. He turned and ran out into the hall, across the back porch, and down the back steps into the shallow sea. He waded through the dark water, paused, turned back, and could only see the glare of a floodlight on the surface. He turned back ahead and slogged on toward the koi ponds. He came to the gate, opened it against the current, and saw an orange flash through the water at his side. He turned around, then turned back through the open gate, and gazed across the black, rippling surface.
Both koi had been freed by the flood; freed, perhaps, to die in a field or to slip down a storm drain toward some more hopeful end. In any case, they were no longer swimming in the world of the two boys’ dreams.
After the sea receded, Armen and Peter didn’t speak to each other for weeks, and they never spoke about carp or koi again. When autumn returned, Peter did not return to Armen’s school. His family had moved away over the summer while Peter and Armen, living across town from each other, drifted apart.