July 8 daily: Write 400 words based on if an idiom came true. +300 points, +100 more for sharing. 464 words written in total. ----- I’ve lived in the stormy edges of a hurricane a couple times. Our town is far enough from the seaside to avoid massive destruction, but we still get pretty heavy rain. Some might say that even last week it was raining cats and dogs. I never understood why they said that, since it sounds extremely inconvenient. Little did I know the whole city would one day find out just how wacky that situation was. The day it actually happened, I was proven right: it was inconvenient. When I woke up that morning, it had already started. Looking out my window and seeing a few stray cats on the streets isn’t uncommon, but seeing dozens of them, plus dozens of dogs as well? That was weird. I blinked a few times, closed my curtain, and went back to sleep. Then the barking and hissing and yowling got louder, and I groaned. Whatever was going on, if it was real or a hallucination, I clearly wouldn’t be able to sleep. Trying to drown out the noise with loud music in my headphones, I made myself breakfast before getting curious enough to look outside again. Yep, there is was: it was raining, and there were cats and dogs everywhere. Every animal outside looked confused. Some were running around sniffing each other, some were frozen in place from confusion. The cats were mostly climbing up trees or houses to avoid everything else. What the heck happened? I wondered. Did the entire animal shelter break free and choose to live in my front yard, of all places? That’s when I actually saw it: a poodle falling from the sky, flailing its fluffy legs around, then landing on the grass. I stared for a few seconds- was it okay? Somehow, the poodle got up, seemingly unharmed. Next an orange tabby cat landed on its feet in the middle of the road, just in time to sprint out of the way of a car driving up the street. On top of the car sat a few little teacup dogs, plus a grouchy calico cat that clearly didn’t want to be there. One thing you might not realize is the amount of stink that hundreds of cats and dogs running around and falling from the sky willy-nilly can produce. There’s the poop, for one thing. There’s the wet fur smell for another. It couldn’t just rain cats and dogs, it was raining water, too. I don’t want to think about how all those animals were finding food. I also don’t want to think about how long and how painful the cleaning process was after all that. Luckily most of the animals were quick to run away, probably to go harass someone’s farm animals… but they left behind a whole lot of mess.
