Sunday, December 18, 2011 | By: Brianna

The Rainmaker

It always sounded like thunder whenever anyone walked down this particular hallway.  Other meteorological beings liked to joke that the thunder was the sound made when the angels went bowling up in heaven, but all the children knew where the thunder actually came from.  And it was mostly because Reyes had butterfingers.

Reyes was the only one who worked in the Rain Lab, which was a good thing because chances were that no one would be able to work with him as he rushed from station to station in the small gray-painted room.  There was one window, and that was a false one made by Reyes' niece.  It was made out of paper cut and glued together and covered in glitter, showing the world as it would have been outside.  A rolling hill and a bright yellow sun which contrasted Reyes' usual frantic demeanor.

The Rain Lab was a curious place.  Three out of the four walls were covered from floor to ceiling with strange and complicated looking machinery made up of brightly colored knobs and buttons and cranks and switches. The fourth wall was a large shelving unit.  Each shelf was packed with boxes of varying sizes.  Shoeboxes, little jewelry boxes, and some the same size as a small person, and each box had a little yellow tag hanging off of them with printed descriptions of the contents.  One larger box was labelled "monsoon" and nothing else.  In the center of the room there was a hexagon-shaped console of sorts with a periscope attached to the outer bars of the console.  This periscope was lowered rather than raised so the Rainmaker could see the results of his work.  And I say "his" because the Rainmaker position had run in the male line of Reyes' family for about six generations now, so it was almost always assumed that the Rainmaker would be a man.  Anyway...

Today Reyes was in the process of making a snow storm for the Midwest region of the United States.  After turning a couple knobs and blowing a whistle or two, it seemed as if everything was going smoothly.  Reyes ran a hand through his sandy brown hair, ruffling it absentmindedly as he puzzled out what to do next.  He'd been perfecting this snowstorm for about a week now, and he wanted to have it ready for the Christmas holiday, but it just wasn't looking too great at the moment.  Reyes' stormy gray eyes found the piece of loose leaf paper sitting on the center console, a letter from a little girl in Chicago asking for a White Christmas.  And not just the Bing Crosby movie.  Picking it up, Reyes skimmed the scrawly writing again in search of some clue that would help him finish up this picturesque snow storm.

"And it would be really great if the snow would sparkle in the moonlight.  Okay, thanks!"

Sparkle.  Reyes leaned up against the center console and stared off at the window his niece had made for him.  The carefully cut rays of the sun, the crayon smudges that made up the hills and the glitter everywhere.  Glitter.  Reyes leapt to his feet (don't give me that, Google Chrome, you know "leapt" is a word...) as if something had bit him and he tore the handmade window off the wall, scraping some of the glitter into his palm.

"This should do the trick!" he announced to no one in particular as he scrambled across the room to a suction pipe under which he held his glitter speckled palm.  The pipe sucked up the glitter and the machine swallowed the little specks, making a satisfying clunking sound as it churned out a quality snowstorm into a milkcrate sized box.  Reyes grinned and packaged up the storm, labeling it for Christmas Eve before settling down to enjoy a nice cup of hot chocolate after a hard day's work.

"I wonder what it's like to be the rainmaker.
I wonder what it's like to know that I make the rain.
I'd store it in boxes with little yellow tags on every one.
And you can come see them when I'm...done..."
- Matchbox 20 "Real World"

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