“Raining?! You’ve got to be kidding me!”

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Maddie stopped short as the sudden downpour caught her unawares a few paces on the outside of the automatic glass doors of the Student Services building.  She cursed today’s blue sky and sweltering heat that gave no clue to the downpour scheduled for this evening.  She was late again as she so often was.  And as he so often was, Jim was going to be mad.

 

She searched through her hold-all, hoping she had put an umbrella in, but no!  Once again, she had left home without it, even though, due to the drought, the weatherman had promised the artificial rainfall every evening for a week, starting tonight.

 

“Saves on watering the garden, at least,” Jim had said, his usual despondency lifting momentarily into sarcasm as he mocked the need for artificial rain.  No one had a garden these days.  There was no room for a garden in a city covered in concrete.

 

The rain replenished the city’s water, and made everyone feel like they were living a normal life.  It had not rained for days, weeks even, and so the weatherman decided that this week, they would have rain and so it was scheduled for 1900 hours.

 

Usually this would not have been a problem for Maddie, but tonight was the first night of the scheduled rain, and she was late ...