It was the most normal Wednesday of any day of any week ever, and how it managed that we didn’t know. Grey skies over grey streets filled with grey air, the ground already soaked and the skies about to follow through.
And it was right in the middle of everyone’s commute, too. The world just getting out of beds, the feet on the streets, when right on time right on target here came the first drop, beading and bubbling like a bubo against the turf, and it bulged and bulged and the
up
came
rain
bloop, into the sky, and it vanished.
Nobody saw it. But when the next drop, and the next drop, and all of the others did… well.
We probably saw it then.
An ordinary Wednesday, all over the world. A rainy-dreary Wednesday, all over the world. And every drop and every splish and every splash all hauling itself up out of the dirt and soaring off into the sky, off to who-knew-where, and not a drop remaining.
By Thursday morning there was a thin film between us and the sun, baby-blue and giving the world a funny tint. And the crops were getting dry, and the farmers were getting worried, and we were all a bit concerned which was good timing because that’s when the lakes started going.
Every river was a snake, every pond was a bomb in reverse, slip-sliding up up up and gone. The fish were inside them still, and they were cackling like maniacs. We saw them give us the finger. It was very impressive because fish do not have fingers. They did it anyways, until they were too high, too high to be seen, and off into the sky to join the rest.
Around then we had our first clouds, which had been evicted down into the dirt as much as all the water was taking off. A disgruntled, surly bunch, and we weren’t much happier because commuting through a cumulocumulocumulus isn’t much easier. They were snarly and snappish and they told us this was all our fault.
Friday night, the oceans kicked in, and that lasted until the week came back.
All weekend long, it was all we spoke of. Seeing seas set sail. Up, all of them, up into the wilder, bluer yonder. Whales and dolphins and manatees and salt-water crocodiles, spiralling up and over the land and into something better. There were salmon and sardines and trout and tuna and carp and cod and we even saw a very few old, old sleeper sharks, those doobies of the sea, the greatest, greyest grandfathers of all living vertebrates.
They slept as they swam. As was their right.
Monday, Monday, hateful Monday, and not one drop of water remained. The clouds were still mad, but willing to carry messages, or at least nasty ones.
“They say that it’s all your fault,” they told us, the cumulus and the nimbus and the stratus and the cirrus and the copernicus. “And you’ve made your bed, so they’re going to make you mad in it.”
What if we tried some things? we asked.
“It won’t help,” said the clouds. So we tried some things anyways.
We tried begging all our gods. It didn’t work because all our gods’ grandparents and older siblings were also from the water and they were really sorry but their hands were tied no hard feelings.
We tried apologizing sincerely and offering to return to the water as was our home. The clouds told us we’d had millions of years to do that, all of us, and if the cetaceans and crocodiles did it we should’ve taken it as a hint.
We even tried begging them to spare just a few bits of the rest of the world, because there’s more on land than just humans. The clouds told us that this was about more than just us and not everything’s about you and only you, you big fat babies.
We tried calling the new waves that filled the skies the New Panthalassic. The clouds informed us it had its own name and it was the right name and it was never going to tell us it what it was.
So eventually we tried science.
It was hard work. Hard science. Lots of complicated tricks.
We were in the deep dark by then, in the cold. The sun was buried under a blue-black blanket and we had to dig down for our warmth and our power. For food we had to find fungi, for drink we sucked each other’s veins like vampires, recycled urine, leeched each other like medieval chirurgeons. It was all possible by the miracle of science that a tiny percentage of us were kept in enough comfort to keep telling scientists to keep us alive long enough to keep them all hydrated.
And then, at long last, out of a groaning machine that could barely support its own weight, came a gush, then a trickle.
And it was placed in a glass.
And that glass was brought to a throne on top of eighty-five hundred slowly desiccating bodies.
“Blessed be the indefatigable ingenuity and tenacity of humankind,” said the old man, through a dry, dry mouth.
And just as he put the glass to his lips, the water went – plish – like that, and slid up on and out of the ceiling.
That was this morning.
Now I’m just sitting out here.
Haven’t heard a sound from underground in a while. I might be the only thing left.
And it might just be because I’m getting colder, but I could swear that sky’s dipping lower.
Guess I really am the leftovers, if that’s happening.
And just like that, the first drop. And right on my head, too.
What a typical way for it to end, on a Wednesday.