Nothing But The Rain by Naomi Salman (2023)

"Truth is, we have no idea what's going on. After I was done scribbling my panic in all caps I calmed down and wrote out all possible explanations for what's been happening. Naturally aliens are on the list, right next to the rapture, the apocalypse, and sleeping with my phone under my pillow. (They all used to say it wasn't good for your health.)"- p. 16

Laverne is living in a world without her own memory. The town she lives in, Aloisville, is on lockdown, surrounded by guards in rubber suits who don't allow anyone to leave. This stuckness; the inability to leave home, the inability to look back on one's own immediate history and social history, and the difficulty in seeing beyond the present is a mental block preventing human life itself. In a normal world someone would go to the doctor for a check-up and probably receive a diagnosis for some mental illness. Or, open up the Bible and wonder whether or not he or she had eaten something horrifying on accident and is being punished as a result. But Nothing But The Rain isn't about the normal world. There aren't any doctors to go to. And no one is talking about the Bible. Laverne, using what's left of her own rationality, discovers that the problem is in the water. Every drop of rainwater slowly erases a person's memory once it touches the skin. Or worse, a deletion of memory once ingested.

What would you do if you woke up to a world like this? After her meager water experiments, Laverne starts with what else is already with her: her own thoughts, a pen with which to write - impulse and reflection - and by protecting what surrounds her - her "home" (more of a shelter devoid of any personal belongings by the time the story begins) - all used to gather the last fragments of reality. She writes on the walls, then on paper. Slowly, she begins to remember bits and pieces of her life and actually begins to wake up. She arrives at a terrible memory - maybe we only truly begin to wake up when we realize our trauma - a memory of euthanizing civilians in her town who had completely lost their minds. She remembers she was a physician. Put them out of their misery.

"I'd give anything to get run over by a car and be carried to the ER." - p. 73

In a place like this, it isn't difficult to understand why a person wouldn't want to be social in any capacity whatsoever. Fear of the outside, fear of letting someone untrustworthy in, not to mention dealing with personal, bodily trauma and its subsequent paranoia. But Laverne still has one person she is in contact with, her neighbor and friend Katie Rathbone and her daughter Zoe. But Katie is eager to leave the town, start over, without addressing what's actually happening to the people there, which is all mobilization without thinking of the real cause to Laverne. Isn't politics like this these days? Still reactionary. People desperate for hope and meaning, jumping on a political movement to make themselves feel more at ease with the world, disregarding a different horror, perhaps not understandable through reason alone. Laverne's anger with Katie is made more potent because of her child Zoe, completely lost to any notion of reality, contextual and otherwise.

"Zoe just listened and stared. Poor kid, I thought. Her mother's going to get her killed. Because of course Katie was undeterred. We can get out if we've got something to hold against them! She was all excited. Dave Logan found one bar! Dear Lord. A bar of gold would've been more exciting than what Dave Logan found: one bar of cell service." - p. 41

In Aloisville, there is a complete lack of authority. The electricity and the water still run, but the townspeople have no idea who's behind it. The rubber suited people guarding the city do virtually nothing but stand there only to make sure no one leaves. She doesn't describe them murdering people, but by the end it is known that they do. As Laverne continues writing, she begins to simplify, calling them "rubber people" instead. The rubber people standby close to the general population on the streets, acting as if nothing serious is happening and Laverne bears witness to this. One day she walks to City Hall through the "plastic streets" and from the building's front steps she watches the crowds move, seemingly without direction or clear intentions, as an empty red bucket rolls around in front of her. At the very least, she tells herself, she tried. To be a part of it, to understand.

"Walking through the crowd, all I could see were desperate fools who had gotten each other all worked up in their own little echo chamber. So deeply persuaded by their own ridiculous power. I wanted to yell at them to wake up. How did they know it was possible to bargain with the rubber people guarding the borders? ... They had no tangible proof. Only pipe dreams born of exhaustion... because the happy pioneers were dead already." - p. 70, 81

Towards the end of the story, though this might as well have been happening the whole time, Laverne hears the gunshots and the screams of people, dying or leaving. Cleared of civilians by the rubber people, Laverne decides she can too, given the borders are opened and unguarded. She does. There is nothing left but the rain, the saved water, her words, her story, and the woods that wait outside the town's gates. She finds Katie there in the woods and, not without struggle, takes Zoe from her mother and keeps her instead, leaving her old friend alone to fend for herself.

The plastic streets behind them, the rubber people behind them, the mimetic crowd of delirious people needing a quick fix behind them, what might Laverne and Zoe do next?

Does the problem with the water disappear, literally or metaphorically? Does it, could it become something new?

"That's how it works - in retrograde. A droplet is all it takes for confusion to set in. You lose your days as if they were melting off, going further and further into your past. Little sugar dolls left in the rain, that's what we are now. If you're not careful, you'll melt all the way down to the infant inside. And if she melts away, you're done. Can't form new memories; I suppose you forget how. So now you're just an empty shell walking around, until eventually you starve to death." p. 17

And there was nothing but the rain, the saved water, her words, her story, and the woods that waited outside the town's gates.