Rain On The Cahill Expressway

• Kelly Moulds, Grade 12
• Short Story
• 2008

The city is empty. The roads, with their perfect white trails dividing the shadowy Tarmac in half, lay sprawled across the manmade landscape, deserted.
Skyscrapers cast blankets of grey across the walkways and statues below, like sailors in a crow’s nest shouting down warning of the iceberg ahead.
Thick clouds form overhead and make duller the muted colours of the pavement and overpasses of the concrete fortress which lays, waiting, open to destruction.
Fine droplets of rain, inaudible as they land across the cityscape, begin to fall from the darkening sky.
He stands on the kerb, waiting.
The rain becomes heavier, and thick drops create small black patches on the man’s navy suit. He does not care. None of it makes any difference now. He is alone, and the brick and steel that surrounds him does not know how to critique or judge; it may as well not exist, as it only serves to make him feel more alone.
How ironic that it should be raining at the most miserable time in his life. He was born in the rain, on a roadside en route to the hospital. His first kiss had been in the rain. When he had proposed to his wife it had been raining, and as she nodded her head and threw her arms around his neck in joy, a brilliant rainbow had formed in the sky above them.
How ironic that he – someone who had once struggled and fought so hard to stay alive – should be standing here now, waiting for the end to consume him.
When they pressed the button, his life would end in the same way it began. But instead of his mother’s screams, they would be his own, and instead of a soft cotton towel, the matter around him would be the debris of concrete, glass and steel as his city was blown apart around him.