Pip and the Day It Rained Laughter

Pip was clinging to a lamppost on Maple Street because the pavement was getting way too slippery with spilled lemonade. Okay, you remember when the clouds dumped two tons of cooked spaghetti all over the library roof last week? Pip thought THAT was the weirdest afternoon this town would ever see. Pip was wrong! So completely wrong! Because today, the clouds didn't drop noodles, or hail, or even normal rain. At two in the afternoon, the sky turned a strange, shimmering shade of electric bubblegum pink. And then... it started dropping sounds. Tiny, sparkling, fizzy drops that didn't go splash. When they hit the ground, they burst into tiny, popping chuckles. Literally! Drops of pure, uncontrollable LAUGHTER were raining straight out of the sky!

At first, everybody thought it was fantastic. People ran out of the bakery catching the pink mist on their tongues. But within ten minutes? Complete chaos. Nobody could do ANYTHING. Officer Higgins tried to direct traffic, but a raindrop hit his mustache and he fell right onto the hood of a taxi, wheezing with giggles. The town bus driver was laughing so hard tears were streaming down her cheeks, so she had to park straight across the sidewalk. Worst of all, the town dam operator, Mr. Henderson, was rolling on the grass by the reservoir, howling with laughter, completely unable to turn the giant safety valve before the pond overflowed! Pip pulled up the hood of a yellow raincoat.

The rubber kept the drops off, but the sound alone was practically vibrating through Pip's sneakers. One rogue drop splashed against Pip's cheek and—whoa. Pip let out a loud, breathless snicker. It felt like ten thousand fizzy sodas bubbling behind Pip's ribs! Pip bit down hard on the inside of a cheek, clamped both hands over the yellow hood, and sprinted. The problem wasn't just the rain. The storm was feeding on itself! The louder the town laughed, the darker pink the clouds grew, swirling like a giant bowl of cotton candy ready to burst. Pip needed something completely, totally, absolutely NOT funny. Pip skidded through the doors of the abandoned municipal weather station on top of Blueberry Hill.

The giant brass weather horn—the one meant to sound emergency siren blasts across the valley—was pointed right at the belly of the pink cloud. Pip dug frantically into a backpack. What was the most boring, serious, un-laughable thing in existence? A joke book? No, disaster! A comic? Worse! Then, Pip felt it at the very bottom of the bag: Great-Aunt Gertrude's three-hundred-page manual on the historical taxonomy of decorative gravel. It had zero pictures. Pip shoved the microphone of the weather horn right against the pages. Pip took a massive gulp of air, cranked the horn's volume to maximum, and began to read aloud into the brass trumpet. Pip read about grey pebble density.

Pip read about pea gravel sorting methods. Pip read about the chemical composition of standard crushed limestone. The giant horn blasted the droning, intensely dry words straight up into the swirling pink storm! The clouds actually hesitated. A drop of pink fell toward a flowerpot, fizzled, and turned a dull, sensible grey. The giggles in the air began to thin out into confused little snorts. Pip didn't stop. Pip shouted an entire chapter about sidewalk grading into the horn until the great pink cloud let out one giant, exhausted sigh—and dissolved into clear blue afternoon air. Down in the square, Officer Higgins sat up, wiped his eyes, and finally blew his whistle.

Down on the grass, Mr. Henderson blinked, scrambled up, and cranked the safety valve shut. Pip leaned against the brass horn, looking out over a quiet, soaking-wet town where nobody was laughing anymore—just smiling, tired and peaceful, under a wide, sunny sky.