The pine siding of the barn was darkened by the night's rain. I say the night's, but it also rained throughout the previous day, and the day before, and before. For weeks, or months, or years it fell, in unnatural persistence; sheets and sheets of gray rain. It pounded the trees, and grass, and bare earth violently--a great, watery siege on this earthen city. Little by little, the world, the barn, the fields and trees, began to starve. The deep green of life faded into the dull gray of the rain, everyday a little more. The trees hunched over, seemed to twist and darken, shedding their lively leaves. Naked, they jutted cruelly into the sky like tangled barbed-wire. Shamefacedly, the young flowers bent and kissed the gray-black earth.
The two humans, boy and girl, brother and sister, had watched the siege from the barn loft. Through sheltered eyes they had observed the sky's dealing of death upon their grass and earth. They saw the contortions, the gray-fading scape. They saw all that they loved (excluding one another) stripped of it's beauty. Or perhaps they only thought they saw. It was always dark while it rained, and the rain never stopped. Perhaps they had only feared that they should see, and their eyes gave life to nonexistent terror. Or, perhaps it was worse. Perhaps that same gray acted upon them—the life already half-drawn from their pale cheeks, like the young flowers. She happened to keep a picture of before. To her, the ever-still mixture of red-ploughed clay and rolling green, the proud, un-painted barn, and the majestic trees looked like an artist's rendition of some alien world. She knew it must be her own. Or at least, she knew that it had been. But that world was gone, lost in the torrent. "The world altogether gone, and we, only a dream. Why should we be more real than those shadows outside, beneath the heavy rain." The boy and girl began to twist their thoughts to the blinding presence of the rain. Jagged, tangled thoughts entered, darkened their minds.
"Can you still see the trees outside?" She asked, her head very still, looking into the empty dark rain.
He walked lazily to the opening, he didn't seem to care very much. "I think so...Well, I don't know."
"What did they look like?"
"They looked cruel...before that, I...can't remember." He began to cry, quickly stopped, and again turned his gray eyes to the emptiness. She didn't notice, she couldn't. It didn't matter anyway.
"I never saw them before."
"No, I don't suppose I did either. I don't suppose we can see anything. I can't see you...I can't hear you."
"No, it's gone. Goodbye."
"Why 'goodbye'?"
After a pause, "I don't know."

The next morning, however, they leaned against the damp planks of the barn wall, smiling, talking, shielding their eyes from the sun.