It was so hot that summer even the city sweated, secreting scumsoak that slid down the architectural wrong angles like leftover snail down a porcelain plate at L’alleygator. New Zork City was parched and cracking. Droughtable. Unprecipitationalized. Muggy—No Relief In Sight, says Chief Meteorologist, as the headline might read. Hell, the local ratboys even tried drinking the urban sweat and died, swelling till they burst as clouds of pungent mint-green gas. How's that for a cause of sewer “steam”?

* * *

Gideon Snarls, chief editor of the New Zork Times, threw open his office door, stuck his head—big, lit cigar protruding—into the greasy typewriter chaos of the newsroom and yelled, "Dowd!"

Hushness.

"Somebody tell that fucking kid Dowd to get his ass in here. Pronto!"

* * *

Earlier that day, Rodert Dowd had woken up without the aid of an alarm clock in the tenement he shared with his younger brother and his dying mother, washed, shaved, dressed himself quietly in the only suit he owned and, grabbing his notebook, exited the building into a New Zork dawn still fetid with the memories of last night's debauchery and the general lingering destitution of modern life. Their fridge, like the shelves of the city's grocery stores, was mostly empty, so Dowd was on an empty stomach. He'd buy a butter coffee on the way (probably made with margarine, or worse) and later munch on his editor’s salted nuts.

In a neighbouring building a woman screamed obscenities at a guy named Frank. Dirty kids kicked a can down the street, followed by a lame old man screaming, "Hey, there could still be pineapples in that!"

The sun lingered on the horizon as if it wasn't sure it had the energy to keep rising.

Dowd walked the half block to the bus station, took the bus to the subway then took that all the way to Maninatinhat, where, passing what he noted every day were increasing numbers of homeless, he emerged like a rat from a hole into what passed for high society these days: bankfiends, scalpelized socialites hanging off the sclerotic elbows of their fauxdaddies, impeccably groomed elderbangers, thin bug-eyed human calculators, sly sellers and other unintended socio-economic effects.

He headed toward the New Zork Times building.

Inside: seated behind his quarter-cubicle semi-desk, Dowd turned on his computer and took out his notebook, and started reviewing the leads his editor had given him last Friday, which were all depressingly worthy of his lowly position, But, hey, you gotta start somewhere, right? You should feel lucky even to have a job—and at a paper as prestigious as this one, no less; not a shitmag like the Post-Haste, he'd been told on his first day, before they’d started paying him. Now he had a real salary, a future, a career, kid, when word came down that Gideon Snarls wanted to see him, Pronto! and Dowd’s first thought was, “Shit, I've been fired.”

* * *

“Dowd?” Gideon Snarls said from behind his great mahogany desk, laying down his cigar.

“Yes, sir,” said Dowd.

“Have a seat, kid. They tell me you're doing good work down there in, uh—”

“Minor Events and Local Puff,” said Dowd.

“Minor Events and Local Puff. It may not sound like much, Dowd, but I'll tell you the God's honest truth. Many an ace reporter’s started down there. Breeding ground of success. Now, Dowd, you tell me: how’re you finding the daily grind? (“Oh, it's—”) Excellent, kid. Excellent. Because have I got something for you! Something big.” He picked up his cigar and took a puff. “You know, Dowd, when I got this lead I'm about to tell you about, I thought, Who can we put on this? Who's got the chops, the skill. Know what I mean? And, by God, if I didn't think, Why, there's a fresh kid down in, uh, Minor Events and Local Puff by the name of Dowd, a real down-to-Earth go-getter type. A young cub with integrity. A lion. By the way, Dowd, how's your mother?”

“She has cancer,” said Dowd.

“Oh—huh. I will admit, I wasn't expecting that. You got me with that one. That's the kind of unpredictability this old paper needs more of! Young blood, I always say. Young blood.”

“Thanks, sir.”

“You're welcome, Dowd. Now this story—you ever been outside the city, kid?”

“No, sir,” said Dowd.

“Call me Gideon.” He smiled; when he did, his head suddenly resembled a pale watermelon with a gaping stab wound, through which Dowd could see the moist crimson of the inside of his mouth, complete with little black seed-teeth. “What a perfect time to see the world. In the middle of this heat wave, this drought. How have you been eating, Dowd? Times are tough. Not a lot’s been growing. Hey, you want an orange? Take an orange. Hell, take one for your mother too.” There were several crates of oranges beside Gideon Snarl’s desk, all with the words Accumulus International stenciled on them. The top crate was open and Gideon Snarls reached in, pulled out two oranges (his hands were as large as his head) and held them out to Dowd, who hadn't seen fresh produce in weeks. The grocery stores were out of it. “Don't be shy, Dowd. Go ahead, take ‘em. Perk of the job. Pre-completion bonus pay.” Dowd took the oranges. “Just remember: if you end up doing shit work, you'll have to bring ‘em back.” [...] “Just kidding, Dowd! Just kidding! Even if you do a shit job you keep the oranges! You keep the fucking oranges!”

“Thank you, Gideon.”

“I like that. I really like the sound of that confidence. I respect a man who takes a pair of fruit when it's offered to him. Now, about this lead, you ever heard of Lowrencia?”

“I believe I've seen it on a map.”

“A beat hound and a cartographer. Would you look at that! The kid's got skills. The kid stays in pictures, as they say out west. You know what they say out west about Lowrencia? Absolutely nothing, Dowd. It's the literal middle of nowhere. Farmland, heartland, crops, tractors and more farmland. I'm bored already. Agriculture makes my eyes water, but water’s the very thing. Lowrencia’s the only place in this country that's not baking right now. They've got rain, kid. They've got actual fucking rain and the soil is happy. I want you to find out why. I want you to fly out there and find out why. Will you do that, Dowd? Can I trust you? Breaks like this—it's the stuff careers are made of…”

Stolen story; please report.

* * *

Six hours later, Dowd was mid-flight.

It was nighttime when the plane touched down, but even through the darkness he could see how low, flat and empty the landscape was.

It made him dizzy.

He crossed the tarmac to the airport, which looked to him unnaturally rectangular, constructed as it was of ninety-degree angles. Inside, he was met by an unusually dressed pair of locals: a man and a woman, both naked save for their transparent plastic trench coats. “We are from Accumulus Corporation,” said the man. “Your lodgings have been arranged. In the morning you will accompany us to tour nearby fields, Mr. Dowd.”

“How do you know my name?” asked Dowd.

“Young blood,” said the woman.

Young blood…

“Welcome,” the man and woman said—in… unison.

Young blood…

Dowd couldn't help but stare at their ideal naked bodies, so visible beneath their plastic trenches.

“Do you know [...]” he asked, and asked, and asked, hoping to get a headstart on his assignment, but neither the man nor woman truly answered him. They spoke politely and their words seemed like satisfactory answers, but later, when Dowd considered them more closely in his motel room, their meanings seemed to dissipate. They weren't exactly wrong; their responses were simply devoid of content. Unless they had something to communicate, the representatives of Accumulus Corporation spoke in perfect nullities.

Dowd slept until seven in the morning. He awoke to grey skies and the patter of rain on a window. The world beyond stretched toward the horizon in lush green shades of fertility. At eight-thirty, he heard a knock on the door: a representative of Accumulus Corporation (but not the man or women from last night). “Good morning, Mr. Dowd,” she said. She was dressed in a transparent plastic trench coat, down which the accumulating rain ran in streaks like young blood down the smooth dying body of a freshly butchered calf. “Did you sleep well in coolness?” she asked.

“For the most part,” said Dowd and asked the woman to come in, out of the rain.

But, “I do not wish to be without cloud cover,” she replied, and she stayed where she was. “I am here only to take you to the fields, where you will make the acquaintance of the Great Atmospherian and conduct a tour. This is my purpose, Mr. Dowd. Allow me to fulfill it.”

“My apologies,” said Dowd.

The road to the fields wound through other fields, already densely rich in crops of all kinds. Fruits, vegetables and organic things Dowd could not identify. The woman drove quickly, paying no attention to the holes in the wet gravel road, and Dowd bounced like a loose orange in a crate. The car’s wipers swiped back and forth metronomically, putting Dowd in a relaxed state of mind—from which each bump violently, physically dislodged him. Outside, from fulsome static clouds, the rain fell.

Eventually the woman slowed the car and they took a final gentle curve and rolled onto an empty field.

The woman stopped the car, and they got out.

Dowd’s shoes sank into mud.

He noted that the field had been very recently plowed.

A crowd of people was already there. Most were dressed like he expected farmers to dress, but there were also a few representatives of Accumulus Corporation, in their plastic trenches, and a tall middle-aged man dressed in what would best be described as a wire-mesh half-dome covered with transparent film. But it was what was below that film, between the film and the man, that surprised Dowd the most: white clouds, which merged and separated and, floating gently, orbited—“The Great Atmospherian,” the woman from Accumulus Corporation introduced him.

“Good morning,” said Dowd.

“Yes,” said the Great Atmospherian, and he led Dowd and the rest of the observers through the field, which to Dowd seemed somehow to stretch toward and away from the horizon at the same time, and the sun, shining from behind the rainclouds, glowed brighter and bigger than before.

“Do you like rain?” the Great Atmospherian asked.

“I do when we haven’t had enough of it,” said Dowd and explained how bad the drought in New Zork City was.

The Great Atmospherian mmmd.

“You’re lucky you’ve been getting so much rain here,” said Dowd.

“Yes,” said the Great Atmospherian. “Our good luck.”

They came now to a series of stone* steps set into the field, which the Great Atmospherian climbed first, followed by Dowd, who, upon reaching the top, saw that the steps were not just steps, but steps connected to a long and narrow trough that sloped so subtly toward the ground it seemed to end beyond sight. Despite its length, both the steps and the trough appeared to Dowd to have been hewn from a single rock. (* Really, it was bone.)

“We welcome today Rodert Dowd, this year’s journalist from the city of New Zork, to participate in our humble consecration ceremony,” the Great Atmospherian told the crowd. “By this, we prepare a new field to receive its seed,” he said—more quietly—to Dowd. “In the city, you have grown apart from tradition, but here we still believe in the old ways. Everything returns. So-called luck is earned. You are, of course, entitled to think us backwards, Mr. Dowd.”

“I think no such thing,” said Dowd.

The Great Atmospherian yelled to the crowd, “Young blood!” and “Young blood!” they responded.

“Hey—” was all Dowd could say as he felt hands grab him, then coldness on his neck, and pain, shock and so many desperately misgargled words dying in his throat, words never to be released, tasting of the moist inrushing air, because the Great Atmospherian had run a curved blade horizontally across Dowd’s neck, opening it—now forcing Dowd’s half-decapitated head backwards by the hair so that his young blood, pouring hotly down smooth skin, trickled onto the origin of the long bone trough, and others’ arms placed him reverently chest down, slit-throat forward so that in the last moments of his life, with pulsing eyes that flashed the sun on and off, criss-crossed by throbbing veins which looked to him like streaks of lightning, Dowd saw his own blood begin to flow down the trough: a deep red line running from his death toward some unseen end point. As the remnants of his biological life thundered in his ears, he heard the Great Atmospherian bellow, “Blood fertilizes the plain!”

Then darkness.

* * *

Dowd felt himself begin to rise.

He could not say how much time had passed because the concept of time itself had seemed to pass, the way childhood fantasies pass, into an adult appreciation of their creative insignificance.

Not-with-eyes, he saw—from above—his own corpse lying on the trough, expelling a torrent of blood.

He was ascending, or some part of him was ascending—(Dowd did not believe in any gods or an afterlife or anything after death, but I believe it is accurate to say that what he felt was himself-as-soul leaving his body.)—, and in his ascension he felt a kind of tranquility, a lightness of being, an ununderstood comfort about the place to which he was intended. He felt calm. He thought about his brother and his mother, and he thought about the aridness of New Zork City, and the face of Gideon Snarls puffing on a cigar…

All around him floated the fluffiest clouds he had ever seen.

He reached out to one—

something solid clasped his ankle. (“Got ‘im!”) He was yanked down and landed with an existential thud on a hard smooth surface. He barely had time to register the barrel-chested brute in front of him before the beast’s whip came down, and Dowd curled up to escape its blows, which burned like acid.

“Up! Up! Up!” the brute commanded.

Terrified, Dowd uncurled. The brute stood above him, whip ready to snap at any hint of disobedience.

“Wait,” Dowd tried to plead, but no sound came out.

The brute laughed.

“Up!”

Dowd got to his feet, tried taking a step backward—and realized that what had clasped his ankle was a metal ring, attached to a metaphysical ball-and-chain.

“Go,” the brute commanded, pointing to a place in the distance where a dozen other nude figures were raising and and lowering pickaxes, rhythmically, hopelessly, clanging them against the surface of the cloud they were on.

Walking, Dowd could barely pull his ball-and-chain. The way was slow.

The whip came down.

When he was close to the others, Dowd too was handed a pickaxe and commanded to chop at the cloud with it.

He did, for fear of the brute and the whip.

Although the labour at first appeared Sisyphean, Dowd soon noticed that it was in fact not futile at all, for every once in a while the impact of the pickaxe upon the cloud produced a fine spray of mist, and that mist, after falling gently and impossibly through the solid cloud itself, became—below—a rain…