{"id":3579,"date":"2022-04-17T11:51:01","date_gmt":"2022-04-17T11:51:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=3579"},"modified":"2022-04-27T18:03:34","modified_gmt":"2022-04-27T18:03:34","slug":"rain-of-days-by-ray-nayler","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=3579","title":{"rendered":"Rain of Days by Ray Nayler"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><strong><em>Rain of Days<\/em><\/strong> by Ray Nayler (<em>Clarkesworld<\/em> #186, March 2022) is about a woman called Sandra whose partner has died (and is referred to as \u201cDeadwife\u201d for most of the story). Sandra, the narrator, now lives in a near-future coastal retirement facility with three other individuals and a variety of support robots.<br>The story alternates between Sandra\u2019s dream therapy sessions\u2014she is suppressing memories about Deadwife\u2014and her time in the facility. Although the story generally has a brooding atmosphere (Sandra is troubled, and it has been raining for days), some of the snarky interactions between the residents and the robots are quite droll:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-style-default is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Annabel shakes her head. One of the service bots is clearing the table. She reaches over and thumbs the sticker from her banana peel onto its head, where it joins the hundreds of other stickers Annabel has been plastering it with since she got here.<br>\u201cIs that my tip?\u201d the bot asks.<br>\u201cNo, this is your tip: Electricity and water don\u2019t mix. Whatever you do, stay dry on the inside.\u201d<br>\u201cUseful information. I\u2019ll keep it in mind for the robot uprising. Gotta work on our weak points.\u201d It totters off with our trays.<br>\u201cI like that one,\u201d Annabel says. \u201cOf all the things in here that talk, I think it has the best sense of humor.\u201d<br>\u201cI\u2019m taking that personally.\u201d<br>\u201cYou should.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>The story ends (spoiler) with the alarms going off in the middle of the night and Sandra awakening to find the Lifter robot picking her up. She is taken through the pouring rain to the refuge of a nearby lighthouse. There she reunites with the other residents, and they watch a tsunami hit the facility. During this cataclysm, Sandra remembers walking through tropical rain to the hospital and discovering her partner, finally named as Josephine, dead.<br>I liked this, but it is essentially a mainstream story about a woman triggered into remembering a traumatic memory\u2014albeit one pepped up with snarky robots and a disaster movie ending.<br>*** (Good). 5,050 words. <a href=\"https:\/\/clarkesworldmagazine.com\/nayler_03_22\/\">Story link<\/a>.<br><br><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Rain of Days by Ray Nayler (Clarkesworld #186, March 2022) is about a woman called Sandra whose partner has died (and is referred to as \u201cDeadwife\u201d for most of the story). Sandra, the narrator, now lives in a near-future coastal retirement facility with three other individuals and a variety of support robots.The story alternates between [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[147],"tags":[539,24,486,622,852,148,537,12],"class_list":["post-3579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ray-nayler","tag-539","tag-3-2","tag-bereavement","tag-clarkesworld","tag-memory-therapy","tag-ray-nayler","tag-robots","tag-short-story"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3579"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3579\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3718,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3579\/revisions\/3718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}