The following is ten minutes of me drafting a yet untitled story.
Chevy’s grandmother used to talk about rain the way sports fans talk about the great season their team had once upon a time. She loved the rain. She would run outside in whatever she was wearing and stand under the grey sky, pellets of water smacking her skin and rolling into the loose dust where they became mud and muck and then groundwater. She would laugh then and talk about how Arizona wasn’t built for rain; about how they would close roads and sometimes schools because the water came all at once and it filled the streets to the point where nobody knew what to do with it. That was all before the Ghost Dance.
People thought the dance just changed the power dynamic in the southwest, but it did more than that. When the early winter rains filled the skies the ground soaked it all up greedily. When spring finally broke and the moonsoons followed the ground soaked that up as well. Then something peculiar started to happen. The rain didn’t lie in the gutters or pool in washouts waiting for the morning sun to suck it back up into the sky. It took root, holding fast to the earth and soaking through and making the ground fertile again. Grass and brush grew where previously there was only rock and tumbleweed. In the valley of 10,000 horses life flourished.
No one knew it was magic at first. The effect seemed to be even across the deserts of Arizona. By the first summer after the grow many of the places where life had tried to resume were reclaimed by the heat and the dust. Only pockets of habitable earth survived that first summer. These were the lands least affected by shadow. It was thousands of acres and at the edges of the growth it seemed die off quite suddenly, as though you could trace a line around where the earth was fertile and reveal where it was not. His grandmother called those places Rainshadows. They were often the patches of land closest to the mountains and she warned him about those places. She warned that the areas where life did flourish drew their spark from the places where the water fell the least.