Of course, she thought as she stepped out of the house and had to immediately go back in for an umbrella, any time there’s a 5% chance of rain, that means there’s a 100% chance of it raining on you, specifically.

This was a thought that was neither accurate nor in keeping with her usual sunny and defiant cheerfulness. But her feet hurt, her head hurt, and she had woken up in one of those general and ineffable foul moods that generally had her checking the calendar to see whether she needed to blame her uterus.

She was not a person given to manifesting - despite the many Girlboss jokes she encountered, what she did believe in was making life give you what it wanted, and according to Elaine, this was more of a hostage negotiation than a peaceful communing with the laws of attraction. But maybe if she was, she would have blamed herself for what followed - because what followed did so literally, hovering just over her head as she went about her business.

It was not until her third errand of the day that she realized that no one else had their windshield wipers on. It was not until the next, now that she was on her guard, that she became aware of the fact that she was the only person lugging an umbrella around. She watched a mother and her two children leave the bookstore with their eyes turned skywards in obvious confusion, unprepared for the downpour in the parking lot.

She had just paid for a salon blowout, and she’d barely gotten three days out of it. This was bullshit. She was grumbling under her breath as she left the vet’s office with a case of Petitcru’s expensive food under her arm, which - of course - she proceeded to drop on her foot. Limping into the post office to check her PO Box for gifts from her professional admirers yielded nothing but junk mail and a broken nail when the key got stuck in the lock. She considered firing off a disciplinary text to the negligent b*****d who’d promised her a little something-something extra in said PO Box, but rejected the idea out of awareness that he might consider this a reward for failure. When she limped back out to the parking lot empty-handed and angrily sucking on her bleeding fingernail, she was not even surprised when the wind caught her umbrella and turned it inside out, leaving her soaked by the time she had hobbled to her car. With a grim awareness she looked at the cars parked across the street, which glittered as if newly-polished under beams of uninterrupted sunshine.

I hate this ******** city, she whispered as she started the car, almost expecting a failure of the engine to turn over. Her relief when this did not happen was short lived, and replaced with a surge of irritation at the sudden failure of a wiper blade, its disintegrating rubber trailing uselessly over the windshield like a sad deflated balloon.

“I get it!” she said aloud. There were an awful lot of things standing in for the idea of God in her life lately - the cosmos, Order, the Code. It made sense that Destiny City itself got a turn. “Is this some sick joke? You’d be prettier if you smiled kinda s**t? I’m already pretty!

She banged her hands angrily on the car roof - an ill-advised move as her sore finger complained with a sharp stab of pain - and opted instead to flash double middle fingers skywards. A passerby on the sidewalk, scuttling through the rain towards the sun on the opposite side of the street, gave her a strange look. She disregarded it, and shoved her fingertips into the corners of her mouth to force an exaggerated smile, prompting the stranger to break out into something closer to a sprint to escape this insane b***h Joker smiling in front of the post office.

And then, as if on cue, the rain abruptly halted. The last few drops found their way down her streaky windshield where the broken wiper blade still pathetically squeaked in its futile throes, and she looked at their descent in disbelief.

“Are you ******** kidding me,” she whispered. And then, louder: “******** you. I’m not smiling again until I mean it.”

This seemed, at least, not to incur another round of rain. Good enough, she thought grimly. At least she could drive home in the sun.

word count: 751