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Crying in the Rain is a 6000-word short story by Tanith Lee, about a family struggling to survive in a radioactive, post-holocaust world. It was first published in 1987.

Spoiler Warning: Plot details and/or information about the ending follow. If you wish to enjoy the work first, stop reading here and return at another time.

Plot

Greena (the narrator) tells a story of a day when she was about 15 years old, living on a farm with her mother and her younger sister and brother. Her mother took Greena into town, even though there were reports that it might rain that day (the rain is radioactive). Once in town, inside the “sealtite”, they visit a man and talk with him awhile, while Greena’s mother negotiates a price with him. After coming home, her mother explains that she’s going to die soon (she’s about 30 years old, and already past the life expectancy of about 25), and she had to make the arrangement to sell Greena to make sure she would be all right. She explains that the man’s original fiance had “canced”, and that he himself had some genetic defects which made procreation risky; that’s why he wanted Greena (who had been sterilized at a young age) for a wife. Her mother tells Greena to be sure to have her sister sterilized when she turns five, and to make good arrangements for them when the time comes.

Greena remembers a day years earlier, when she was six or seven, and she saw a one year old child crying in the rain in the middle of the street. Greena’s mother had put Greena in her room, and gone out to get the child, whom she took to an emergency unit after the All Clear, but the child died anyway.

When she was paying for the treatment and our own decontam, the unit staff said horrible things to my mother, about her stupidity, until I started to cry in humiliated fear. My mother ignored me and only faced them out like an untamed vixen, snarling with her cracked teeth.

All the way home I whined and railed at her. Why had she exposed us to those wicked people with their poking instruments and boiling showers, the hurt and rancor, the downpour of words? (I was jealous too, I realize now, of that intruding poisonous child. I’d been till then the only one in our house.)

With the arranged marriage, Greena now lives in the town, inside the protective dome, safe from the radioactive rain, and she better appreciates what her mother did for her.

Reprints

This story has been reprinted in Donald A. Wollheim's The 1988 Annual World’s Best SF.

External Links

• Crying in the Rain at ISFDB.org