Raining Men From A Lacerated Sky

You ever have one of those moments where you realise once again that maybe you think a little differently from the people around you?   I get those a lot.  I seem to have spent  a lot of my life watching people nervously back away while nodding and smiling.

Of course sometimes I do it deliberately....

In this case it started when "Raining Men" came on the works radio and one of the ladies I work with mentioned that having men drop from the sky would be "so great."

 "You've got a different mental image of that than I have ." I told her. 

"Why? What do think it would look like? she asked me.

And I told her.

When I had finished, there was a pause that stretched on a little too long. She may have blinked at me nervously. In the words of Britney "Oops. I did it again."

You see, every time I hear "Raining Men"  I don't think "Happy and camp." I think this:

You look up at the sky and it looks wrong. Dark, angry clouds boil overhead with red light flaring through the gaps like bloody gashes in bruised flesh. And the rain begins.

Hundreds of tiny, tiny shapes dropping from the clouds. As they grow nearer you  see that each one is a man, his arms and legs flailing frantically, clawing at the sky in a futile attempt to slow his fall just a little longer. 
 Then you hear it. The screams.  The sound of hundreds of men crying their last in terror and impotent anger because they don't understand why this is happening to them, only that they are going to die.  

The first man lands. Metal crumples and glass shatters as he smashes into the roof of a car with a sickening crunch.  The next arrives on the pavements outside, screams ending in a final explosion of violence. He bursts open before your eyes, blood spraying across the road. 
There's blood on your clothes now, and on your face. It's strangely warm. 

 All around you tumbling bodies are hitting the ground with a sickening noise, and you start screaming for it to stop, that this is not what you meant. This was never what you wanted. 
 The storm stops. A final body topples from the roof top where he landed, as shattered as the slates that tumble away behind him, as limp as a rag doll and he lands at your feet. 

He looks like he was young.  Maybe he was handsome once. But his eyes are open wide, his mouth is frozen in the shape of his final, wordless howl. And he's lying in a puddle of his own blood and brains. 

The storm has ended, the rain finished. The clouds melt away as fast as they came, the eerie red light fading with them. 

All that is left is the blood, the broken bodies crumpled in the streets and gardens...

And the memory of the screams. 

 So the next time you hear that song, just remember:

Scream. Splat. Splash. 

That's all folks.