"What If Rain Was a Rare Commodity?" An Original Short Story
Author Lorrie Moore once said, “A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage.” With Sunday Shorts, OprahMag.com invites you to join our own love affair with short fiction by reading original stories from some of our favorite writers.
The best short stories are the ones that conjure whole worlds in the span of just a few pages. By that measure, and many others, writer Claire Rudy Foster's “The Rain Artist” is something to behold.
In their acclaimed fiction collection Shine of the Ever, Foster vividly brought the splendor and squalor of grunge-era Portland to life, but here they illuminate an otherwordly, Atwood-esque dystopia in which water itself has become a commodity only available to the wealthy. This includes even the rain, once a natural process but now merely a simulation performed at rich people's parties—“Rain Parties” they're called. Such extravagant occasions call for the ultimate indulgence: handcrafted umbrellas, something only our story's heroine, Celine, can provide.
As our tale begins, Celine has been hired by the wealthiest family in the world, the Weisses. Celine arrives at their rain party with her curiosity piqued—a sense of tension that swells when one of the younger Weiss sons asks her to carry out a potentially ghastly task. Written in crystalline prose, “The Rain Artist” is scathingly smart and unwaveringly suspenseful.
“The Rain Artist”
Celine Broussard was the only umbrella maker in the world. For nearly a century, generations of Broussards had made umbrellas in the finance district, behind a sandwich shop on a cobbled alley that stank of either onions or the coppery pellets that subdued the city’s dust, depending on the season. After her mother died, Celine cleaned the studio, removed its sign, and kept in touch with her clientele. The storefront was soaped with pale gray paint and Celine kept a white pressboard cat on the sill. The cat had a circle around its eye like a monocle.
Celine’s work was unparalleled and unchallenged, which gave her immense freedom. She was the sole proprietor of Parare Pluie. She knew the value of her craft, and her clients paid it, knowing they were buying her discretion as well. The rain parties, across the decades of Celine’s career, had become unrestrained spectacle. In exclusive clubs and specially designed rooms, rain still fell down the collars and saturated the shoes of wealthy men. It was cheaper to sprinkle your guests with freshwater pearls for two hours. Money was the opposite of rain: It only trickled upward.
The Weiss rain party, which was set for next month, ordered two hundred and twenty-one umbrellas. The Weiss family owned eighteen percent of the world’s remaining icebergs and was said to have a chunk of glacier in each room so that guests could lick the ancient ice and suck the polar water directly into their mouths.
In the back room of her studio, Celine finished the Weiss’ umbrellas. They wanted a winter theme: white, everything white. Instead of water-repellent neo-nylon, they requested a special, hand-waxed, washi-texture canvas for their umbrella canopies. Once, the bespoke umbrellas were porous, plain, and minimal; that was old-fashioned. Making umbrellas taught Celine some things about the rich. First, they were not as clever as people with fewer resources. Second, they were deeply insecure and protected their assets the way an ordinary person protected their reputation. Third, there was no innovation among financiers, which was why the rich copied one another slavishly. For example, if one family placed an order for umbrellas with gold-spattered canvas panels or umbrellas shaped like gingko leaves, Celine inevitably received dozens of copycat orders. The Weisses, apparently, were more inventive than most. Their party would feature a wall of ice blocks with gifts frozen inside them. The rain would be warm: a tropical downpour that turned the ice wall to water so that the sealed, plastic gift boxes inside floated like coffins rising in a flood.
A single umbrella took four hours to make, from its hand-stitched canopy and handle guard to the time Celine needed to fasten the stretchers to the ribs with pin-sized, golden screws. She turned out three umbrellas a day or sometimes four, when her hands weren’t misbehaving. Her joints were the only aging part of her body. The rest of her was young, pushing sixty-five. She sat on a tall stool over a table protected by thick silicone mats, which were covered in razor cuts, rulers, and cross hatching. Leftover gores cut from grey suede and butter-colored silk were draped in neat plastic tubs.
The art of making umbrellas was as aristocratic as the parties people used them for. If she’d been less cautious, she would have found an apprentice. Celine beheld the secret, saturated world of the ultra-wealthy. She saw their excesses, took their money, and kept her mouth shut.
The Weiss order was for two hundred umbrellas of one pattern and another twenty of a different design for a planned flash dance routine, which would be performed by hired entertainers. They requested one umbrella for Robert Weiss to carry: a special design, to commemorate his retirement. His eldest son, CEO-elect Henry Weiss-Broms, would continue overseeing the vital work of harvesting brine for salt from the shallow northern sea. Henry and his half-brothers placed a second, secret order for three identical umbrellas with an unusual design: hollow aluminum tubing, oversized gores, and a spiked ferrule, like a bayonet designed to shed blood instead of water. Celine bundled these separately, with cork dice on the pointed tips to keep them from losing their edge.
She paid Paul to come with his van, load the order, and take her to the skyscraper in Midtown where the rain party would be. As they lifted the long boxes of finished product into the van, Celine winked at the white cat for luck. She had found it years ago on a curb in Queens, where a film crew was cleaning out a bedroom-sized set. Nobody noticed her taking it, sliding it into her canvas bag, and vanishing down the street with part of their movie. The cat, implacable in its self-satisfaction, looked perfect in the window—as though it had always belonged there.
Celine was not concerned that anyone would steal her umbrellas: they had no value to an ordinary person, because there was no rain. To the average person, an umbrella was a museum piece or a novelty. They would not even know where to sell it, though you could get practically anything else on the black market, from fresh lilacs still covered in artificial dew to new organs, grown in an agar stew offshore and smuggled into Manhattan by fishermen. All the same, Celine felt a twinge of anxiety when the van stalled at an intersection and was surrounded by commuters, faceless behind their filtration masks and goggles, swathed in layers of reflective insulation. Someone slapped the broad side of the van, and she jumped.
Midtown was packed with ghosts, some benign and some not. She watched a group of investment bankers in identical padded vests and illuminated high-tops gather around a tamale vendor, who pressed plastic-wrapped packets into their outstretched hands. At the curb, a pigeon tried to lift a hot dog bun that was nearly as big as itself. Forty-foot electronic screens scrolled on every building, advertising new data plans, library events, musical and theater performances, awards, and civic regulations. Nobody looked at the pop-ups, but they filled the street with an eerie, pink and blue haze that hung in the permanent twilight of the city. Dry beams of sunshine sometimes slipped among the skyscrapers, but between the tall towers it was cold and thick with grime. Shadows adhered to pavement.
Paul drove gripping the wheel, peering through the grit on his windshield with the focus of a sniper. The streets were dark, even at two in the afternoon. Pedestrians in day-glow jackets skittered across intersections; the colors of their clothes popped into high relief when Paul’s high beams passed over them. Many of them wore headlamps or had added safety trim to their bags and backpacks.
The van eased toward the Flatiron through a river of humans who did not yield to traffic or acknowledge the encoded signals marking crossings and corners. Periodically, a distinct feature would emerge and flit like a moth, distinct for a fraction of a second, before the busy, fragmented movement of the crowd subsumed it. As soon as Celine caught a glimpse of a naked eye or a strip of patterned fabric or a logo-marked pocketbook, it was gone, and she forgot what she had seen as instantly as the feature had caught her attention. Street life was the opposite of her studio. By the time they arrived, a mild stress headache pinched her scalp. It was not a consolation to think of other passengers in other cars going to other destinations. The Weiss family traveled by car only when leaving the city: that was the function of money, to go from comfort to comfort, bypassing the inconvenient parts of being human. For intraurban travel, they used independent helicopters or other sky transport to take them from one place to the next. For the party, they would arrive in a charter sky bus en masse as the event was starting.
Paul helped load the umbrellas into the service elevator onto a luggage rack provided by the building. “Safety first,” he said, which was their own lucky ritual. He patted the stack of cartoned umbrellas.
“I’ll be back in a couple hours. Text you,” she promised.
“Don’t take any wooden nickels.”
Neither of them had seen real wood, just the pressed laminate made into umbrella handles and high-end tables and chairs. Even the umbrellas were a relic, an opulence beyond the reach of all but the wealthiest. Most people would never see rain; they would never even hold an umbrella. Celine grew up hearing about an older New York, a city where people lived like small sea crabs, scuttling from peel-paint cold-water apartments to the subway to the packed soup of open-air offices and then home again, with umbrellas clamped in their hands to protect them from the nearly constant rain or intense humidity. In the days of rain, her grandmother used to say, you could get a cheap, disposable model at any news stand; many of them were made from corn fiber or other biodegradable matter that gradually lost its integrity and leaked or melted on the plastic frame. But that was back when rain was everywhere, so much of it that the Hudson Canal was filled to its rim with floating droplets of pollutant-rich water. Celine thought these were fairy tales: tall, living trees that cast cool shade on lawns watered with natural rain. Her grandmother was the one who told her about the wooden nickels, though what a nickel was, was never clear.
The order loaded, Paul shook Celine’s hand and stepped back, disappearing into the electronic smog. The elevator rose with a clank. The main elevators were set on titanium rails and ran silently, operated by people who wiped the glass doors clean at every stop so the wealthy never had to see a fingerprint or filthy smudge. Workers were not allowed to use the main elevators. The service elevator was for everyone else; it had no attendant and groaned and creaked as it slowly ascended to the mezzanine. The panels were stamped aluminum, uninsulated, with a square cut into each side. The floors slid by; the tubes’ green cast segued into natural-frequency bulbs that mimicked what sunshine used to be like. Clouds manifested from anything that vaporized but did not shed water as a precipitate. Celine caught glimpses of offices and people: swatches of hanging art; plastic plants with vivid rubber leaves; a digital fountain that streamed HD footage of moving water; and broadcasts of stock updates, weather reports, soft colors, and repetitive tonal music designed to calm the mind and lull people into forgetting that their environment was unnatural.
At the mezzanine, an attendant met her, rolled the cart to the second elevator, and swiped the security passcard that enabled her to ascend to the room where caterers were staging the tables and flatware for the Weiss’ rain party.
A man with tall hair and an illuminated tie helped guide the cart past a table laden with chafing dishes. They’d lit the small, blue, propane flames and set the heating lamps over the laminate boards that would hold chunks of wild game meat. Ordinary people ate ground cellulite and vegan fillers; it was possible to get slices of petri dish steaks, pink and flaccid and round as the containers where the muscle fibers were cultivated, but those were prohibitively expensive. The Weisses had an animal reserve in Montana that kept cows, sheep, antelope, bison, deer, giraffe, and ibex for the family’s personal use. The meat was flown, fresh, into the city.
The only time she’d ever had real chocolate was at these rain parties. Its rich, acid flavor was one of the many reasons she looked forward to the lavish celebrations. For this dinner, they would have antelope steak, truffled giraffe bites, and prime rib. Seafood wasn’t safe unless it was farmed, so they ordered a hundred domestic lobsters, pulverized into flavored puffs. They’d serve it with red heritage wheat harvested from the family’s agricultural facility, a massive hangar that was used for food research and contributed to the taste libraries that corporations used to customize the flavors in ordinary people’s meals. Celine could eat faux squid ink pasta any time she could afford it; the Weiss family got the real thing, doused in natural butter and garnished with a frisson of crispy tentacles.
The catering manager swept the handful of menu cards off Celine’s table before she could see what was for dessert. “We put you as close as possible to the wall. You’ll be in the splash zone, but you can move back once things kick off.” He grudgingly handed her a card. “If you stay, there’s a full meal provided for staff. You weren’t in the head count, but we have enough.”
“Thank you,” she said. Nobody liked working these things, no matter how good the money was. There were rumors that some of the rain parties devolved into orgies, with guests compelling service workers to take part. The tips were never what they should be for cleaning up after a handsy gang of plastered executives. Like anything else, the pay was inadequate, but who could afford to turn it down? The catering manager had the fifty-yard stare of a veteran events planner. Celine squared her shoulders.
“You have ten minutes,” he said, and she nodded, one professional to another.
She laid out the umbrellas as though arranging a bower of peonies. The three unusual ones with the spiked tips, she set aside, tied with a simple white ribbon. She was beside the wall of ice. Its tender chill seeped through her garments and caressed her skin, making her shiver.
The commemorative umbrella was white and embroidered with tiny Swarovski crystals that glittered like dewdrops on the treated, waterproof, dupioni silk. The catering manager struggled to set Robert Senior’s chair on the dais, slightly raised above the other guests. As Celine looked over the banquet settings, she knew each seat would be filled with a well-fed, pampered body, one that had never known labor or serious pain. Wealth diffused stress the way umbrellas shed rain, showering it on the people beneath them, whose job it was to support the canopy at all costs, at any cost, for life.
Those people were not invited to experience rain.
Celine staged the white umbrella on the guest of honor’s chair and went back to her table to make sure the pieces were prepared for the hired dancers. The ice wall dripped behind her. She was seized with a sudden desire to press her tongue to it, then her face, just to know what it was really like. Celine had never tasted ice. Most people never even saw it in real life. They had ice on television, but it was just cubes of plastic painted with pale blue glycerin. The frozen water you could make at home was not the same thing as this monolith that loomed over the whole arrangement. Celine could see the individual shrink-wrapped Prada and Balenciaga jewelry boxes floating within its glossy body. The logos on the packaging looked wavy and distorted through sixteen inches of frozen water. The spigots in the ceiling were programmed to spray body-temperature rain on command in a pattern that complemented the evening’s agenda. Celine eyed the angle of the nozzle over her head, trying to guess when she should make herself scarce to avoid getting soaked.
“Excuse me,” the man said. His hand brushed the small of her back. She recoiled.
“Sorry,” she said. A trademark: even startled, she had perfect manners.
“Are you with Parare Pluie?” He was tall and wore a deep blue suit, the color of simulated whale hide. His hair was naturally silvered around his widow’s peak and his eyes, also silvery, shimmered like a specialty tech display.
“Yes.”
The miniature camera on his lapel blinked at her. He wore no jewelry, and his skin was flawless, as though grafted over his skeleton. He had no pores, but his complexion was rich and plump with vitamins. Celine realized she was looking into the face of the son of the richest man in the world.
“I need you to do me a favor,” Henry Weiss-Broms said.
She nodded, knowing that whatever he asked for, she would have to give him. She turned to collect the trio of barbed umbrellas and offered them like a deadly bouquet.
“I can show you how to open them,” she said. “The tips are hand-filed and very sharp.”
“Cork,” he noted.
“Synthetic, but it’s just a protective measure.”
He shook his head; it didn’t matter. “How did you get here?” he asked.
“I hired a van.”
“When are they coming back?”
“I wanted to stay for the chocolate,” she said, feeling childish. “And I wanted to see the rain.”
“So, after.”
Although she could hear some clinking from the direction of the galley kitchen, nobody was nearby. They were all alone at the wall of ice: the trillionaire and the umbrella maker.
“I will give you a year’s worth of chocolate if you can arrange to have the van come before the rain begins.”
It was a fortune. Celine was grateful for the gift of preternatural composure.
“But I will miss the dancers,” she said. Both of them ignored the fact that she hadn’t been invited, wasn’t staff, and could be removed from the premises at his whim. She was the only artist of her kind: a species of one. There were plenty of other trillionaires, and she kept this in mind as she began to push her luck. “I don’t know if I want that much chocolate. What would I do with it? I might get tired of it after a month.”
“You could sell it. High grade isn’t available on—most markets,” he said, tactful. He was a good negotiator, and his expression was unnervingly gentle. “You go to all the rain parties. You’ll miss an hour of this one.”
“But what an hour,” she said. His eyes flickered blue with temper. Then the silver rings around his irises clarified as the pixels in them resolved.
“Time is the only commodity I acknowledge,” he said.
“I don’t want something that lasts for a year,” Celine said, pursing her lips. “I want to see rain.”
He placed his hand against a frozen block and drew his fingers over its flank. “You know all about rain,” he said. “What do you know about ice?”
She shrugged.
“Do you know what water used to taste like before? It was like vegetable juice and flower petals, filtered through fine charcoal,” he said. “The minerals in the earth gave each spring a signature flavor, finer than an elite champagne and impossible to synthesize.”
She knew spring meant something other than the season but did not ask what it was.
“I drink factory water, like everyone,” she said.
He took her hand. His long, tan fingers made a cuff around her wrist. He pressed her palm to the ice and held it there. Shocked, she would have jerked back, but his grip was like steel. The nerve endings in her hands prickled, then started to burn with overstimulation. In an instant, her skin was numb, and the hand she used to hold her artisan’s razor was useless.
“We talk about the power of water,” he said, “but ice is more powerful. Collecting the purest water, containing it, transporting it, and preserving it is beyond what most people can envision. They drink boiled runoff from plastic bottles.”
She did not dare flinch or struggle. She stared at her hand, splayed like a cuttlefish on the blasted-smooth block. Her nail beds were pale purple.
“Are you offering me ice?” she said. She smiled. He relinquished her hand and watched as she slipped it under her blouse to reanimate against her warm belly.
“Your own glacier. Like I have in each of my homes. Real water, prehistoric.”
She considered. “You would bring this to me?”
“Delivered. Not with your friend’s van, my personal courier service.”
“You can’t use this courier for your errand today?”
He smiled. “Five years of chocolate and your own small iceberg. My final offer.”
“When do you need us?”
Satisfied, he gathered the bundled umbrellas. “After everyone is seated and the preliminary toast is poured, there will be a dance. The dancers have two cues, identical movements. Each time, all twenty dancers open their umbrellas and create a shield around my father’s chair. The second time they do this, the rain will begin. As the rain starts, I need you to take a catering cart of your packing materials down to your friend and load them.”
“Then what?”
“Take them into Brooklyn and leave them by a flower shop. They’ll appreciate the plyboard, it’s good quality.”
Celine squeezed her fingers into a fist. Her vision wavered, as though she was one of the inert gift boxes, waiting to be released.
“Which shop? I never go to Brooklyn.”
He gave the name and stepped back with his armload of umbrellas. He looked pleased: He knew he’d gotten the better end of the deal. Celine flexed her fingers and then tapped Paul’s code into her phone.
Come early.
Why u OK
I got a wooden nickel, she wrote. He put a thumbs up on the message, and she knew he was turning the key even as he put the phone on the passenger seat. He would be downstairs in less than ten minutes. She could trust Paul: He never went far.
***
Robert Weiss retained the breadth and heartiness of a much younger man, but, even from across the room, Celine could see he was fading. The manicured hand that clutched his crystal highball trembled when he raised it to drink. He seemed clamped to the chair on the dais, stiff with the effort of not shaking. Injections eased most neurological symptoms, but there were some things even money couldn’t solve. The man was old, he was sick, he was rich. He leaned back in the padded throne, not bothering to conceal his look of tired disdain as he confronted the three hundred people who had come to retire him.
When the dancers came in, Henry and his brothers rose to their feet, and the rest of the guests followed suit. A throbbing bass line pulsed through the speakers in the walls, and the floor sparkled with an LED display of falling rain. The pattern changed from translucent bubbles to green ones, then faded to a rich, velvety shade of red. The dancers fanned out into two lines, pirouetted around one another, and sashayed to the beat. The umbrellas popped open in sync, prompting an enthusiastic riffle of applause from the audience. The dancers twirled, then clustered in a tight formation around the throne on the platform. The umbrellas opened and spun hypnotically, then snapped shut, revealing Robert glowering in the center. His expression was unchanged and malevolent; his hand was a claw around his glass. The dancers’ bright face paint and glittering costumes were stretched tight, a pantomime of glee. Celine, on cue, edged around the tables and chairs, sidestepping guests who had taken to their feet to cheer on the performers.
She went into the far corner of the kitchen, suddenly nervous, wondering what she had agreed to. Nobody was here; the catering staff were clustered around the portholes, watching the rain fall on their guests. Unable to concentrate, she fidgeted near the pastry racks. What had Henry Weiss-Broms told her? The cart would be ready, and all she had to do was take it down to the loading dock for Paul. She checked her phone. Nothing yet, but she knew he would be there. The music continued. Two of the caterers had their phones out, surreptitiously filming the dance. This was forbidden; the excesses of the water class were protected from criticism, outcry, the press. Even the security cameras were off for a couple hours, guaranteeing the privilege of privacy.
Later, the Weiss’ personal PR firm would scrub those same videos from the web, confiscate the phones and their stored data, and blacklist the caterers. One clip captured the dramatic splatter of blood that coated the round pane in the kitchen door; the scattering guests; and Henry and his brothers, standing over their father’s body, leaning with their full weight on the barbed points of their custom umbrellas. The videos showed how the dancers made a protective ring around the killers, shielding them from the audience but not from the stunned people in the kitchen. It was a coup.
The cart was heavy and clanged against the side of the elevator. Celine averted her eyes from the bundle that contained Robert Weiss’ body. The corpse was shrouded in an opaque plastic sheet and hastily stuffed into a long plywood crate. Two dancers had dragged it into the back and then disappeared, ditching their costumes as they dashed through the rain and into the frenzied crowd. She could not have identified them if she’d wanted to. The descent through the air-conditioned building felt fraught. Each time the cable clanked or she caught a whiff of the offices, her throat tightened and by the time the service car settled at the loading dock she was strangling with anxiety.
Paul was waiting for her and jerked the body into the back of the truck, working faster alone than he could if she interfered. Her hands were paralyzed, as though chilled. Paul hustled her into the passenger side and coaxed the van toward the Queens midtown tunnel. Once the Flatiron was out of sight, Celine drooped in her seat. The darkness, threaded with lines of electronic guideposts, compressed around them. Celine sensed the weight of the dead man in the back. Guilt settled in her stomach like a block of ice. Paul drove as though nothing was out of the ordinary. The headlights touched the soft fog of grit that engulfed them. The long minutes under the high rises that filled the East River district slowly buried Celine’s anxiety. From her purse, she dug a piece of chocolate cake wrapped in a bamboo fiber napkin.
“You took that?” Paul asked, his eyes drifting from the road. She snuck a bite into his mouth and then into her own; their tooth marks overlapped.
“They eat this every day,” she said. The sticky sponge adhered to her tongue and to the roof of her mouth; its flavor was as black as the tunnel and as overwhelming.
“Every day?” Paul blanched, rolled his window down, and spat the dark fragments toward the glossy units mounted on the tunnel wall. He wiped his tongue with his sleeve, over and over, like a cat that is convinced it will never be clean. “No wonder they’re like that.”
“I like it,” she said. She swallowed. The bittersweetness moved through the tunnel of her body and its secret rivers and hidden springs. The cake was too big to finish, and she was already folding the napkin, then folding it again, smaller and smaller, into a shape the size of a seed that she could bury in herself, a seed that knew how to wait forever for rain.
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