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No Single Raindrop

A fateful decision

By J. M. HemmingsPublished 3 years ago 10 min read
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It was almost here. I downed my final gulp of whiskey and tossed the bottle, which exploded on the sidewalk next to a middle-aged couple engaged in frantic lovemaking. Their writhing bodies, stark beneath an all-searing sky that bleached Los Angeles in tones of dazzling arctic white, were but one scene of thousands lifted straight from a Hieronymus Bosch canvas.

A portly banker with crazed eyes brandished a blood-soaked chainsaw, while an abandoned toddler bawled out an atonal screech of anguish. Here people prayed feverishly, there others danced in ecstatic dervish whirls to a symphony of elated insanity. The soundtrack to this waking nightmare was a staccato barrage of gunshots, over which rapturous singing, desperate prayers, soul-rending screams and the mournful wailing of dirges soared. And all the while the indifferent palm trees swayed in the hot breeze, which ferried in a blizzard of ash. I wondered when the ocean would start to boil.

With Tool’s Ænema thundering on repeat out of the condo I was abandoning forever, I set off for nowhere, as lost as all the other damned souls. In my mind a paralyzing sense of guilt stuttered its compulsive and accusatory mantra: I did this. All of this is my fault.

As I stumbled along, a melodic voice penetrated my surreal stupor. She was singing the song – the song – that old nineties one-hit-wonder that gnawed so relentlessly at my synapses with its larval mandibles, and each bright note scythed through the noise of my self-flagellation.

“What if God was one of us…”

The woman floating those syllables on the forest-fire breeze like errant sky lanterns was an attractive young amazon with burnished ebony skin. The wildness in her obsidian eyes was mirrored in the Vesuvian eruption of thick hair from her scalp. Furrowing her brow as I approached, she paused mid-chorus. Before I could vomit out my confession, her cobra tongue spat the venom of that very same contrition into my skull. “This was all my fault.”

“Hold up, hold up,” I said. “Your fault? No, no, this is my fault.”

“Nuh-uh. I did it. I sold the world for a measly twenty grand.”

Our eyes locked in the asphyxiating heat, and like electricity darting between two pylons no words were necessary; we both knew what the other had experienced.

I said it anyway. “The interview.”

She smiled, but there was no delight in the curving of her lips, no pleasure in the deepening of her dimples; in those fleshy crevasses there was only annihilation. “The little girl and the creepy dude,” she whispered.

With chillingly vivid clarity I recalled that fateful encounter. I can’t recall exactly how or when, but I remember somehow ending up in an empty room, the space darkened with chiaroscuro swells of inky shadow slashed by trapezoids of harsh light from a naked tungsten bulb. I was wearing sweatpants and a hoodie. Socks, no shoes, with a plate of chicken nuggets in my right hand and my phone in my left, as if the ethereal creatures had just sucked me off my sofa one Friday night with some sort of cosmic hoover.

The girl and the man, day and night. All I can remember about her is that she was beautiful. Not attractive, not pretty, nothing like that; it was purely spiritual. Beholding the child’s beauty was more like taking in the Milky Way splayed across a moonless desert sky or witnessing the dragon’s teeth of some vast mountain range scraping at a blacksmith-forge sunset, all fire and molten gold.

Another detail I recall clearly is her little black notebook. She scribbled ceaselessly in it, frenetically at times. I had a feeling there were more words in that notebook than all the atoms of the universe.

And whenever I looked at her, I would start to hum that Joan Osborne ditty.

The same visual amnesia blurs my mental image of the other interviewer. A distinctly masculine entity, he did all the talking, and was as slickly confident as a used car salesman on a cocaine bender. A sinister air thickened his long shadow and hovered around him like a bad odour.

Only one question was asked, and I couldn’t help but feel that it was a weighty one; perhaps the most consequential I would ever have to answer.

“We have a proposition for you,” he said. “It’s very simple; all you have to do is choose an option. Nobody but you will ever know which choice you made.”

“I’m listening.”

He gave a slightly exasperated sigh, as if he was reciting these lines for the millionth, or perhaps eight billionth time. “Option one: you get twenty thousand dollars for doing … nothing.”

It was a joyful sucker punch. “Are you serious?”

Like melting rubies in the gloom, a dangerous sparkle glinted in his eyes. “Dead serious. Cash, gold, bank transfer, check, whatever.”

“Bitcoin. Make it, uh, yeah, twenty grand in Bitcoin,” I stammered. My heartrate accelerated from a canter to a gallop.

He chuckled. “Ah yes, that magical currency that exists only in the digital ether! Doesn’t this speculative gambling require more fossil fuel burning than the electrical supply of a small country?”

I shrugged. “It’s the future. Gonna be worth a million a coin in a few years. And look, it’s not my fault it’s not the most environmentally friendly means of wealth generation, but hey, what is? I’m not literally cutting down rainforests and running factory farms and spilling oil in the sea, it’s big, evil corporations and shady billionaires who do that stuff. Don’t try make me feel guilty or tell me it’s my responsibility to change. It’s capitalism’s fault, not mine. That’s like, gaslighting or victim-blaming or something, and it’s pretty gross, actually. I’m just one person, I can’t change anything. Hell, I’m a victim of these systems, man! And look, I have to think about my retirement and my financial security and all that.”

The girl’s scribbling in her little black book became even more frantic.

“Hey kid, you wanna take a break from that writing?” I asked. “You look like you’re trying to cram the last two pages of an essay into the final minute of an exam or something. You want a chicken nugget?”

The moment I said this, an utterly debilitating sense of terror and endless pain, all rolled into one agonizing ball of horror, drenched my soul. It was ten thousand times worse than the worst panic attack I’d ever experienced, and I felt everything that chicken had endured during its miserable, tortured existence, a life of unabated suffering from forced birth to premature, violent death. Everything.

The man chuckled darkly. “She’s vegan. I’ll have some of that fried chicken, though.” As I was gasping and shaking, reeling from what I’d just experienced, he snatched a nugget off my plate and popped it into his grinning jaws. “Forget option two,” he sneered. “You’ve clearly made your choice.”

The girl glanced up from her writing and transfixed the old guy with a look that could have liquefied steel.

He shook his head, rolled his eyes and sighed. “The terms of the bargain require me to tell you the other option, so let’s get that out of the way.”

A predatory parting of the lips revealed a lash of white fangs and a flicker of a serpent’s tongue, and his irises seemed to narrow into reptilian slits of obsidian for a second. A shudder of unease rippled through my core as I found myself thinking about an ancient tree and forbidden fruit.

“With the second option you get nothing personally, and you have to do something,” he said.

“Do what, exactly?”

“Change your entire life. Give up plastic, throw away your phone, your game console, computer, stop driving and flying, go vegan—”

“Uh, no, screw that,” I said. “I have to do all that crap, but I get nada?”

“You didn’t let me finish,” he said. “Do all these things and more, and we’ll enact some real change. We’ll heal the oceans, restore the rainforests and the wild places of the world, save countless species from extinction, free exploited people and uplift them from poverty, topple despots and exploitative corporations—”

“Yeah, uh, that all sounds very nice and responsible, but I have to do all that horrible, boring stuff and I get absolutely nothing in return, not even recognition? No rewards, no popularity on social media, nothing?”

He shrugged. “Not a jot. Not even a single Facebook or Instagram post. In fact, you’ll probably be ridiculed and mocked.”

As unappealing as this option initially seemed, I found myself seriously considering it. This was a chance to enact real, significant change. To save the world, even, to use a tired cliché. But I wouldn’t be able to tell anyone, and nobody would ever know that I was the superhero who turned it all around. And that stung. “I’ll take the twenty G’s,” I eventually said.

A single tear rolled down the girl’s cheek, and a profound sense of disappointment and disgust with myself hit me like a heavyweight’s right hook. This fleeting sensation passed soon enough, replaced with the gambler’s elation of hitting a juicy jackpot.

“Looks like your little project failed,” the man said to the girl. “Like I said it would. And while humankind has always loved to blame me, as you can plainly see, their downfall really had nothing to do with me and everything to do with them. It’s a pity they had to take all the rest of the life on the planet down with them though, isn’t it? So, another reset then my friend, or are you just going to give up completely this time?”

At this point the girl spoke to me for the first time, and as she did, she finally closed her little black book. “You can go now,” she said softly. “And I’m sorry.”

“Sorry for what?” I asked, oblivious to anything but my own gluttonous triumph. “You just gave me twenty grand!”

I blinked and I was back on my sofa. A vague feeling of guilt and unease dogged me, like the first stirrings of flu scratching at the back of one’s throat. I looked at my chicken nuggets and felt utterly nauseated at myself, at our global culture, at the artificiality and greed of everything, its futile callousness, lust for instant gratification and our irredeemable self-obsession, all aptly encapsulated in those greasy lumps of batter-coated death and suffering. But then I pulled up my crypto app, saw a fresh twenty K in bitcoin in my wallet, and quickly forgot about everything else.

Now, though, I suspected that we all understood the true consequences of those easy riches all too clearly, because it wasn’t too long after the interview that the asteroid had appeared.

“I did this,” I whispered to the girl, even though I knew her own interview had gone just like mine.

“I did it too,” she croaked back, choking on a tight knot of a sob in her throat.

“I did this,” someone else gasped.

“I did this,” echoed another, and another, and another, until that was all everyone in this city, this country, this planet was saying as the titan of fire and molten rock cannoned through space toward us.

As the first drops of liquid fire started to rain down from the heavens, we held each other tight, this wild-haired stranger and I, and we wept for all that would be lost forever in this final, inescapable end.

The heavens became a voracious inverted pyre, and the tapestry of taut sky unravelled into molten threads of flame as our clothes and hair started to spontaneously catch fire. Leviathans beached their boiling bodies on our cursed shores, dogs howled out soul-rending laments, flocks of birds screamed in flights of horrified panic, and rats and cockroaches surged from the sewers in anarchic tsunamis of tumbling bodies.

And it was soul-shatteringly beautiful.

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About the Creator

J. M. Hemmings

J.M. Hemmings, a writer based in England, is the author of the Tooth, Claw and Steel epic and a number of short stories.

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