Searing Rain

Prompt: "Help I'm Alive" and "Sick Muse" by Metric
Time: 9 minutes
Result: 387 words

The rain was falling. Hard. More like hail. Except it burned. Hot, scalding rain. She looked up, and the searing rain fell into her eyes. She would have screamed, had she any voice left. So she ducked her head back down, pulled her hood over her head, and ran down the street to the park at the end. The gate was locked, but she climbed the chain-link fence. She lept down, and groaned as she heard her jeans rip. The fence had grabbed her pants and ripped a giant hole in one leg. Her left leg burned as the rain hit her now bare flesh. She swore under her breath, knotted the ripped fabric together to block some of the rain, and continued on. Past the swing sets, past the baseball field, past the once green grass. This was dystopia; no such things had any use now. No one swung. No one played. No one lay in the grass underneath the sun. What sun? All there was was an endless torrent of searing rain. She refused to accept it though. She remembered life before dystopia. Life had been better once, and she knew. There had been light, had been sun. This she knew, no matter how much she had been fed the lies that it was only a dream. It wasn't a dream. She didn't only dream of blue skies, sunburns, children laughing, couples in love; she remembered them. Maybe others only dreamt, as if such things had never existed and never could exist, but she knew better. She knew it had to be more than a dream.

But what if she was wrong? She was fighting for a memory which might have been only a dream. But she was so sure. They had to be lying. They had to have done it. But she couldn't see why. Not even the filthy government workers, the spineless gits who ran everything, liked this. Everyone dreamed of the same sky, the sam parks, the same light. It had to be real. And so she wouldn't stop running in the searing rain. She couldn't. She had to find out what had gone wrong, what had happened to destroy the light, to eliminate things like swing sets and baseball fields and green grass, to find a way to bring it back.