"a christless killer that steps on my stomach"

The girl in the hard hat stood, watching rain flow into the gutter. A man with a saxophone was beside her. She had asked him to play the final dirge for her raindrop. Her raindrop had always existed, and would always exist. "It's almost here," she said. The man, Case, began to warm up, playing scales softly. They stood and waiting in the gray morning. All of a sudden, the girl with the hard hat started jumping excitedly up and down. "It's here! It's here!" she cried. Then she laid face up on the ground and folded her hands on her chest, murmuring the speech she had written. Case began to play a very sad song. A few seconds passed, the song ended, and the girl stood up. She said, "Goodbye, raindrop." They walked home in silence.

The girl with the hard hat sat on her stool, writing a letter. She remembered seeing the crucifiction, when cola dripped from his tail, struggling to hold his head up. She was writing to her raindrop, telling the raindrop of the event. The crucifiction. She thought her raindrop would be interested to know about it. Maybe the raindrop had even been to that same spot, once. She told her raindrop about how a few years ago, she was playing baseball, and she had fallen down and cut her toes. It was an embarassing day. She told her raindrop about when her brother had been born, on the boat. Her brother, with the golden mane. She wrote her raindrop about the first day of his life, and the last, and about how they had always had fun, playing games and singing songs. Her raindrop was dead for now; it had gone into the gutter. But soon it would be back, somewhere else. She wrote that she wished her brother could have been alive to meet her raindrop.

She went to the racetrack that afternoon and bet on her usual horse, Flower. Flower did alright, but never won the race. Today, Flower came finished in fourth place, but it had been a close one. The horse could probably have come in third, but had an injury on its leg today. The girl with the hard hat was dissapointed that her favorite horse had come in last, but she thought Flower would heal and be able to race again. She was wrong, though. After the race, she met her friend Case, the horse's jockey. "Hello, Case," she said. "Bad luck today." Case looked sadly at her. "Yes, my horse is in a lot of pain. I think by racing her today, I made it worse. I need to put Flower to sleep." By that, he meant he needed to kill his lame horse. This upset the girl with the hard hat. She shook the jockey. "You can't! I can make him better! You'll see!" She was near hysterical with grief, and quite angry with her friend.

Then it began to snow. Snow was the same as rain, but the girl liked rain better. Snow meant cold. So it snowed at the racetrack, and afer all the other horses and jockeys had left, she was there, on all fours, screaming into the white nothingness.

The next morning, when Case went downstairs to get breakfast, he saw that Flower was gone. He walked all around the yard calling the horse's name, but she never appeared. Case thought Flower might have tried to run away, but he didn't know why. Flower would never do something like this.