prompt: rain (2) / title: a pilot's tale in misc. flash fiction

At first, they were just thankful that there were no casualties and minimal injuries, all aboard able to walk away from the plane crash, probably due to the fact that sand dunes are far more forgiving than solid ground or the unforgiving surface tension of the ocean blue. They’d been tasked with sneaking behind Mussolini’s North African lines by air, to infiltrate and blow up military infrastructure, and damn if they’d almost made it before getting clipped in a dogfight they saw the better of yet still crashed. Their radio equipment obliterated upon impact, there was no way to contact any of the Allied bases let alone the Royal Canadian Air Force high command that sent them off on their doomed mission. And considering their interception, anyone coming to their rescue could be damned to an even worse fate than their own along the way. If they were to live to do any damage to the local fascist infestations, let alone to once again tread their home and native land, they were going to have to get through that wasteland via nothing but what they could salvage of their own equipment, their skills and a healthy measure of dumb luck.

Major Shaffer lead their efforts through that scorching desert with a combination of stoicism and improvisational wit but he was a man of intellect and ingenuity, not a man of faith, and as the hours stretched into days and provisions dwindled, he was ill-prepared for attempting to maintain their morale through promise of fortune’s intervention. Nose to grind, stiff upper-lip, he excelled at but playing to hope, that was a bit beyond him. “I’m an officer,” he said, “I’m no chaplain.”

Religious men in the troop tried to speak to the holiness of their mission, fighting injustice, that God would see them through this, but as they trudged north further and further, the temperatures just rose and their water supply waned and he had no answer other than to just keep going. After days of struggle and nights of ragged camps with parched mouths and hungry bellies, it looked as if they had reached their inglorious end. Stubbly and exhausted, they collapsed in a heap of bodies and waited for the end. Until. A single drop of rain. Seemingly out of nowhere. Then another then another. A freak thunderstorm had somehow descended, miraculously.

The usually-unemotional major could only look up to the sky and, once he realized that it was not a hallucination, exclaim “It’s raining, men! Hallelujah, it’s raining, men!” “Amen!” went up cheers from the tired troops drinking their fill in cups from the sky, racing to save it in tent-tarps.

The major lived to see home and had a son he named Paul, in honor of Saul becoming Paul when he finally his faith and that son, Paul Shaffer, went on to co-write the song “It’s Raining Men” in honor of his father’s epic tale, giving the disco duo The Weather Girls their sole commercial hit.

Last updated July 10, 2020