In our town, it will downpour for almost the whole month of July. No one knows why, but this had been happening since the town was first settled. Naturally, because our town is so weird, it will only rain within the fake town limits set by the townspeople. The second you drive into the surrounding towns or north into the national park, the weather will go back to being whatever the outside world has deemed it to be.

The average span is twenty-two days of nothing but dreary and unrelenting rain that soaks our town. In my lifetime, that seems to hold true. The shortest the rains have been is eighteen days, and the town’s water supply ran out for a brief week or so that October. The longest it’s ever been is thirty-one days, and the trailer park was swallowed by the swamp on the south side of town. I recall this happening in 2006, because I vividly remember my fourth grade teacher up and vanishing late that year. My friend Toby lived there at the time, and we took him in for about a month.

The funny thing is that there are never any floods in town. Many people would assume there would be a biblical flood that would wash over our town and we would be waiting for rescue on our roofs like many victims of Katrina, but this is not the case.

Most of the water flows into the reservoir just south of our town that the central part of the state uses for power and other resources. This reservoir is fucking HUGE and never overflows, not even when these monsoon scale downpours strike our town.

That’s not to say that our town won’t have its fair share of dangerous flash floods during this perilous time.

Next Chapter: 04