The Last Time 
by Lurath Colden
It’s the last time. Everyone was informed, and everyone imbibed the information somberly. There was no smiles or laughter or a single “good riddance”. So many times they had cursed the rain, its monotonous dripping and the swell of chilled air it brought in its wake. It would rain no more. The clouds were exhausted and paper-bag brown, peeling of the pale blue sky and drifting to the fields of wilted maize and frijoles, whose flowers looked like folded paper, with too many creases. 
They stood out for the last time, feeling the heavy drops wash over their naked agonized skin. It fell for two hours, no more; sometimes just a heavy wet drizzle that made your breath smoky like the great lizards of the mountains. It would rain, with drops like marbles, each one creating a puddle on its own in the worn asphalt, before soaking in. the first puddles were dried as one might suck up melted ice from the dregs of a cup with a candy-cane striped straw. The wet feels good, the clouds, for a little while, hide the depressed sky where even the big dipper, that spoon full of warm milk, cant be seen anymore. At least the storm clouds were closer to the dying surface of the Earth, so you didn’t have to think as far as the stars, and feel the emptiness of a velvet black sky. For two hours the world breaths, as the raindrops tickle down hair, run into mouths, soothe the tumbling mind, which thinks about the end of all things.
“ Everything ends, you know, sooner or later” a man says to another human shadow, who is also soaked through.
“I wish it didn’t,” says the other, closing his eyes to feel the whisper of the rain on his pale cheeks. The man reaches for a cigarette, but his fingers slip down, feeling clumsy, to large for the world.
It’s stopping. Over there there’s a part in a cloud, where a shining beam of sunlight cuts through the last storm, a bloody knife, alight with the sunset. The raindrops murmur over the land, kissing the dirt, where it is exposed, calling the worms up to the air for the last time. The trees rustle damply in a soft caress of the wind, and their limbs show signs of remorse, for the storm is their life, and it is fleeing to nothing. There is one more bubble of laughter form he children on the pavement, one more moment of slick flow on the panes, and the mists part. The bold red sun blazes through, drying the green and stiffening the clothes on the line. The last blessed wisp of cloud disappears, never to been found again in the falsely bright sky. The worms shrivel on the asphalt; the flowers fall to the ground, husks of their former selves. The man lights his cigarette, and turns to the other:
“Lets get out of here. Maybe we can go down to the shoreline, get some sea air while we can”
“It’s a good idea,” his shadow says softly, watching the children go quietly inside before the sun burned their bare skin.
 “We might as well enjoy ourselves. See the world, you know; be daring like everyone always says.”
“Yes, lets go. No telling how long it will last, after all.”