The Rain That Wouldn’t Stop

The rain had been falling for thirty-two days.

At first, it was a drizzle, the kind that blurred the glass and made the streets smell like iron.

But then it thickened, each drop heavy enough to sting. The gutters overflowed. The lake swallowed the park.

And somewhere deep inside the waterlogged soil, something began to stir.

Mara kept a notebook by the window.

Every day she wrote the same thing:

The rain hasn’t stopped.

She didn’t know why she kept repeating it.

Maybe to convince herself it was real.

Maybe to warn whoever came after.

Her neighbors had fled weeks ago their houses standing hollow like teeth in a rotting jaw.

She stayed because of the station the small climate research outpost at the edge of town.

Someone had to keep the instruments running.

Someone had to record the numbers.

But lately, the numbers didn’t make sense.

Humidity at 104%.

Barometric pressure off the charts.

Temperatures dipping and spiking without warning.

She sent her findings to headquarters, but the responses came slower and slower… until they stopped entirely.

On the thirty-third night, Mara heard the knock.

Three slow raps on the door.

She froze.

No one should be here.

Through the glass, she saw a man drenched head to toe, his skin pale like paper.

His clothes clung to him as if they were part of him.

He didn’t shiver.

He didn’t blink.

“Do you have shelter?” he asked, voice deep and strange.

Mara opened the door a crack.

The smell hit her first — not mud or wet wool… but the deep ocean.

Briny. Ancient.

“I’ve been watching the rain,” he said.

“It’s not weather.”

Her throat tightened. “What is it, then?”

His eyes gleamed, reflecting the dim light like a predator’s.

“It’s a tide. And it’s coming for us.”

That night, she dreamed of the ocean swallowing the town.

Not in waves, but in walls vertical sheets of water sliding down from the clouds like curtains.

And in the deep blue, something moved.

Something vast.

Something breathing.

When she woke, the man was gone.

But on her desk, her notebook was open.

Her last entry The rain hasn’t stopped was crossed out.

Beneath it, in spidery script, he had written:

It’s here.

By dawn, the water was at her doorstep.

Mara climbed onto the roof, her radio crackling with static.

Far off, the horizon shifted not a storm front, but the curve of a living thing.

The rain no longer felt like rain; each drop landed with purpose.

As if it knew her name.

The last thing she wrote before the water rose over her ankles was simple:

We thought we were measuring the weather.

We were being measured.