Caleb Ross - Dry Dot

Short Story

Story by Caleb Ross.

Published: Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Caleb Ross

Biography

Caleb Ross's fiction and non-fiction have been most recently published in Flint Hills Review, The Green Muse, Vestal Review, online at Dogmatika and Word Riot and is forthcoming to Bust Down the Doors and Eat All the Chickens, a journal of absurdist fiction. Visit him at calebjross.com.

He can often been seen at The Crave Cafe on 39th Street, upstairs smoking ACID cigarillos. Follow the smoke and say hi.

Dry Dot

The rain had been falling long enough to justify giving up on seal repair and ditch maintenance. Doors didn't close anymore and windows, if they weren't broken yet, they were straining. At the first water-fueled death the public's collective sigh began. It continued through death three hundred and forty-two, though the public was ready to embrace the apathy it secretly wanted since death number one.

Death number three hundred and forty-two was the mayor's latest mistress, a woman the newspapers and tabloids gave little attention to. This fact alone was enough for the mayor to believe that she was "the one," so when the waters took her, he felt obligated to cry. He ordered his servant, Durzenkya, to photograph his tears and deliver them to the town's news outlets.

Durzenkya was ordered also to stop the rain. This would be the mayor's greatest PR move yet, proof that he wanted what was best for the public and that he truly loved "the one." Durzenkya was promised limitless resources in the way of manpower, money, and research, but was given a very strict deadline for results.

He knew the science behind the rain, knew that water vapor rises, forms clouds, the vapor gets colder and heavier until it returns to the earth. He knew about actinomycetes, the bacteria responsible for the sweet post-rain smell (though he doesn't remember the smell itself). He could look to the horizon to see the
rain's path, could look to the earth to see its end, but looking up to see its beginning meant taking angry drops to the eyes.

Durzenkya made no progress. He stood in the rain until his pores swelled, until the rain bloated his skin like it would a drowning man. He had forgotten what it was like to be dry, wondered if maybe he never was. Out of options, out of time, and with no other reason for the rain, Durzenkya approached the mayor with an idea. He proposed that credit for the rain be given to their god. The mayor agreed, said "I will create a word for it someday, but until then we will thank god."

The paper ran a dense article praising the mayor for his powers of interpretation. The town thanked their god for the rain. They praised their mayor for explaining the rain. Though the water continued to drown indiscriminately, it validated the major's power in the eyes of the public.

The father of the mayor's dead mistress, an old man who loved his daughter beyond the reach of a flash bulb, was angry at the rain and angry at the mayor for endorsing it. He left one day, steaming with anger, for a solution to the precipitation—his intellect his only resource—and came back after a single day with word of the rain's end.

"I found a dry dot," the man yelled, swimming through the town's flooded roads. "I found a dot where the rains don't touch. Small, the size of a coin." He searched out a reporter ready for details: "about the size of a coin. I watched it for hours. The rain just doesn't fall there." He invited the reporter out to take pictures, but word of the dry dot had already spread to the mayor. The mayor pulled his dead mistress's father aside and handed him to Durzenkya, who was ordered to incarcerate the old man. "We must act," the mayor told the old man's reporter, "in observance of sanity."

The old man, as it turned out, was stronger-willed than his age implied. He suffered his daily beatings with stoic modesty, stealing any potential pleasure Durzenkya may have striped otherwise. Photographs leaked of the old man's wounds. Durzenkya turned public outcry and protest into support by claiming that the bruises were "welts where ideas have lashed this man."

Though the old man eventually bled to death, drained by the welts from his ideas, he was correct in his claim of the dry dot. The dot grew to a spot, grew to an area, developed to a place, and eventually the dry dot was visible from the mayor's twenty-first floor office window. Even the sound of the rain, once brutal and angry, diminished to a soft purr, almost soft enough to count as silence.

Word of the rain's end circulated. The public wrote editorials. The public questioned the mayor's once unquestionable talent for interpretation. "And right before the election," the mayor told Durzenkya. "I'll bet the *other guy* has something to do with this."

Durzenkya and the mayor took to the streets with buckets. They rigged perforated hoses to simulate the showers, to keep every window—every view—blinded by water. They used irrigation pipes and lawn sprinklers to keep the public convinced of the rain. Though they dripped sweat, they couldn't replicate the power of a real storm. About to give up, Durzenkya had another idea:

The mayor called the news stations and had them broadcast those lighter days as "the calm before the real storm."

This gave the public a chance to proof their homes. They covered straining and broken windows with boards, replaced seals, and dug deeper ditches, ready to route the imminent water away from their town. They replaced swollen walls and covered chimneys. They took food from the supermarket, parked their cars in public garages, and filled their basements with bottled water. All of this because the mayor had a unique understanding of their god.

When the public had safely isolated itself from the outside, the mayor ordered his one servant, Durzenkya, to shut off the sprinklers and hoses.

"Re-election in the heart of a disaster," the mayor told Durzenkya as they sat above their frightened constituency, looking over the town through its only open window, "is the true proof of power."