prompt: rain, title: the sound of thunder in misc. flash fiction

So, do you want your good news or bad news first? Of course, you’ll want the good news first. You always want the good news first. You always think that the good news will give you paths toward cheating your way out of the bad. No, it’s fine. You want good first, you get good first.

No, I’m not mad. I’m not even disappointed at this point. It’s just that so many have made the same choice, I don’t get disappointed anymore. I’m just tired. It’s just exhausting, sometimes.

The good news is you’re living in the least-terrible timeline you could have possibly lived in.

This here is indeed the best life you were ever going to get. This is not to undermine all those losses and heartbreaks and failures, of course, we’d never be that arrogant or inhumane. They were awful. We are sorry. It sucks that it went down that way, it really does. This is just to say that in every other imaginable world, it was even worse. More horror. More pain. Not just the knife you felt here, but also the twist. The hard rain that fell here was sleet that shattered your windshield everywhere else, metaphorically, figuratively. And in a few spots literally as well!

There was a world where you hooked up with the crush that got away, for example, they gave you syphilis and you died drooling mad in a nut-barn. The all-expenses paid trip to the Grand Canyon was marvelous right up to the moment you fell in. You have no idea how many times billionaire idiots got your city nuked off the maps while you were flossing your teeth or were trying to not fall asleep in a meeting that indeed could have been an e-mail. How many times meteors rendered this planet unlivable before the first fish crawled on land? How many times your Big Bang fizzled out into A Moderate Popping Sound and nothing ever happened at all?

When you won the lottery, your second cousin once-removed killed you for only giving them two cars instead of a mansion. When you were a rock star you died, because your drug dealer enjoyed cutting your heroin with Drain-O. When you were an astronaut, you exploded so the billionaire could save three bucks on a cheaper o-ring. This was the best you could ever have.

The good news is it’s amazing you weren’t hit by a bus on your very first day of kindergarten.

The bad news? Well, the bad news is, you have a whole lot longer to go and we can’t imagine you could possibly stay this lucky for much longer. You know. For a certain measure of lucky. The fact you’re even here at all, the loosely-formed bag of trauma and confusion that you are, astonishing may not even be a strong enough word for it. Odds are against things staying this good for you much longer. From an entirely relative perspective? Enjoy it while you still can.