The man standing in the rain had always been there, as far as Ellie knew. She remembered first seeing him when she was barely four years old, on a particularly stormy summer's day. She had been jumping from puddle to puddle, running ahead of her parents down the long, steep road that led to their house while pretending to be a frog. The road ran between thickets of trees, straight as a ruler for nearly two miles, and halfway down that path she saw the man standing in the middle of the road. He was tall and pale, plainly dressed in well-fitted black suit that seemed untouched by the rain. She couldn't quite make out his features underneath his shaggy mop of black hair, but she got the distinct impression that he was looking at her, waiting.
Ellie had never been particularly afraid of strangers - a quality her parents had tried hard and failed to change - but something about the man arrested her. She stopped her play jumping and stared back at him, curious and quizzical but unwilling to move any farther. The man simply stood, watching. Then her parents caught up to her, and between the moment that she ran back to embrace her father's knees and the moment that she turned to point out the stranger in the road, he had vanished. Her parents claimed that they hadn't seen anyone at all, which elicited such instant distress that they immediately admitted that they weren't paying attention, but in the years to come it gradually became clear that they had been telling the truth the first time.
The man always appeared when it rained, and only when it rained. Sometimes on a hilltop four or five miles distant, sometimes just down the street, half-hidden behind a neighbor's car or peering out from behind a tall fence. His suit, his hair, and his demeanor never changed, nor did the way he would vanish if Ellie called for someone else to verify what she was seeing. Nobody ever did. In time, he simply became another piece of her life, another pillar that held up the ceiling of her world. Just as the sky was blue and the grass was green and the sun rose in the east, so did the Man in the Black Suit appear each time that it rained.
In some ways, she felt a closeness to him that she didn't feel with any of her friends, nor the few boyfriends that she flirted with in high school and college. His existence felt like a special secret, a wonder whispered from the world to her alone, and that secret connected them through the years with a bond as mysterious as it was peculiar. And though how much attention she gave him waxed and waned as she aged, she always sought him out when the rain began to fall.
When Andy, her first true love, broke her heart, the skies that evening had split with white fire, and the subsequent downpour caused record flooding in three counties. He had been there then, standing on a rooftop three streets away, barely visible save as a silhouette against the violent arcs of lightning slicing across the horizon. Though it was impossible that he might hear her across the distance, Ellie told him about her pain and sorrow, confided things in him that she hadn't told either her parents or any of her friends. That night, half a mile away, impossible as it was, she thought she could see a change come over him. Something different in the way that he stood, perhaps, that seemed to indicate that maybe he had heard her after all.
She never told anyone else about him. Not George, who loved her dearly and whom, in her way, she loved back. Not any of her children, though they were each worth the world to her. And if, on the gray drizzly day after George died, she spent the entire day gazing wordlessly out the window, no one attributed it to anything but the depth of her loss.
So it was that, after a long fight with breast cancer that left her bedridden, Ellie found herself curiously unsurprised when the Man in the Black Suit appeared at her side. Between one blink of the eye and then next, there he was. Outside her hospital window, a light rain pitter-pattered against the glass.
"Well, it's about time," she whispered. "I always rather suspected, to tell the truth."
"It wasn't truly meant to be any particular mystery," he replied. His voice was soft and delicate, a warm tenor that seemed barely a whisper and yet clear as morning dew.
"You should have come closer," Ellie said with a chuckle. "You're quite the looker. Way better looking than George."
The man smiled. "Not everyone would agree."
"Can I ask you something?"
"Of course."
"Why me? Why only in the rain?"
The man looked rueful for a moment. "If I may be honest, everyone sees me, but few people know what they're looking for. I suspect the answer to your first question has more to do with your particular brand of uniqueness than it has to do with me. Though I won't deny I've enjoyed your company these past few decades. As for your second question...it's mostly because you love the rain, but there are nuances that will take a bit of time to explain."
"Explain it to me, then?" Ellie asked, though her eyelids were growing heavy. "It's not like I have anything better to do. Besides...I've been talking to you my whole life. It's nice to hear you talk back."
"If that's what you'd like," he replied. "Here, take my hand. I'll explain on the way."
"Is it far?" Ellie asked, gently taking his fingers into her own as she rose out of bed. "I'd hate for your story to get cut short."
"It's as far as you want it to be, Ellie," the man replied. "And we have as much time as you'd like."
Together, they walked out into the gently falling rain.
********************
I actually was planning to write a different premise altogether, involving gay warlocks, but it got late and I'm super tired and this random thing is what I came up with on the fly. If the ending feels rushed, that's because IT FUCKING IS!
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