The Rain Plummetted, from Lucas's Challenge

The rain plummeted to the ground like tiny meteorites.

Correction, Joe thought. Those drops weren't tiny to the beings who lived in his back yard, the beings he watched through night-vision goggles every evening from his window while he sat in his frigging wheelchair. Those bastards had ruined his life. It was because of them that he’d fallen and broken his back, and it didn’t matter that he’d been out in the yard drunk trying to smash them up with a shovel. They were on his land, his property. And now their constant digging was starting to undermine his house. Already one corner of his porch was sagging. He could picture the honeycomb of burrows that stretched, no doubt, beneath the entire structure of his home.

But now they were getting theirs. To those little monsters the raindrops would be huge, would be meteorites in reality as they plunged explosively to earth, tearing up the elaborate grass nests and filling the pin-hole tunnels in which the creatures lived. He was glad. He imagined the water working deeper and deeper into their black holes, gurgling toward them as they scrambled for a safety they would never find. He hoped every one of the bastards drowned.

Although he couldn’t move his legs, his arms worked and he shook a fist toward the window. “Die scum!” he shouted.

Then he laughed, and pushed away from the window, and rolled himself into his kitchen. He opened his fridge and took out a beer, popped the top and swallowed deeply of the golden liquid.

“Beautiful,” he murmured, as thunder rumbled and the rain started pounding harder upon the roof. “Those rain dancers I hired are sure doing their job. It’ll rain for days. There won’t be a dry spot anywhere around here for those monsters to hide out. Wash them out. Wash them right out of my hair.”

Joe laughed. The rain plummeted to the ground like tiny meteorites. In his yard, in the dark tunnels filling with mud, a race was dying. But one of them, rising on shaky legs in a last dry chamber, began, herself, to dance. Far away, outside the orbit of Mars, something stirred in the asteroid belt. Something stirred. Many things stirred.

A rain began to move toward the earth. A hard rain. A dry rain.