Rain was pouring down for the third consecutive day in the city. Every passing hour seemed to bring stronger winds, more rain, and brighter lightning. The storms began as innocuous showers midday on Sunday, but they had since grown. It was now three in the afternoon on a Tuesday, but the sky didn't appear much different from at midnight the previous day.
Elliott sat at his desk, shaking his leg nervously. He had no customers today; the entire town had decided to hunker down and wait for the storms to pass, but there was no end in sight. He was $10,000 short of his monthly goal, and he had two days to make it up. He couldn't cut it, he thought. Elliott kept glancing around the room, there was nothing he could do other than wait, and it was driving him mad. Outside, hardly a car passed on the streets with all of the torrential rain. No one was going to come, nobody had the money that he needed, these were going to be his last few days on the job. Elliott sat back in his chair and tried to suppress his emotions. He breathed in and breathed out, breathed in and breathed out, breathed in and breathed out, but Elliott still could not shake the feeling that the world was closing in on him and he had no escape. He felt so large and his barely furnished office so small. In fact, he then realized, it was small – even smaller than it should have been. He looked up to see that the ceiling had sunk a good two feet and was completely saturated with water, and it was about to start coming down. Elliott couldn't take it any more. He stood up, walked out the back door, and ran as fast as he could down any street that took him away from the Olive Garden.
Rain soaked Elliott from his hair to his insoles, bolts of lightning streaked across the sky and claps of thunder came sooner and sooner after. He turned left, he turned right, he turned left again, and then another left. Elliott didn't care where he was going, he wanted to get lost.
Elliot had run for hour. It must have been very late into the evening, but the sky had brightened as the storm seemingly had moved on. Now, only raindrops from the leaves on the trees fell down from the sky. The air was fresh and almost completely clean; only a hint of something garlic-y and bread-y seemed to hang in the air. Elliott looked up and began to take in his surroundings for the first time since he started running. He stood on a deserted, residential street, and in the distance, his very own Olive Garden not 100 yards away.
