The Idea, the Place, and the Title (In That Order)
By Ceci Ellis
A Saguaro cactus standing tall against the monsoon storm
The story didn't start with Phoenix, or even with rain. It started with an idea I woke up with one morning: a person finding photos of themselves, ones they have no memory of taking, at places they’ve never actually been. I searched around to see if anyone else had already written something built on that premise and came up empty, which was enough to convince me it was a subject worth chasing. The title, A Rainy Day, didn't arrive until I was about halfway through writing it, once I understood who Roz actually was: someone who saves things back, who's been waiting on a change she's not sure is even coming.
I've lived and worked in Phoenix since 1997, which means I've spent almost thirty years learning what ‘rain’ actually means in a place that mostly doesn't have any. You can go a month, sometimes two, even more than five months without a drop. When it finally does rain, people here don't reach for umbrellas so much as they stop what they're doing and go dance in it. Once the title showed up, the idiom and the desert lined up on their own: saving something back for when you'll really need it means something different in a place where a rainy day genuinely doesn't come often.
Setting her in Phoenix wasn't really a craft decision so much as a default: it's where I live, so it's what I know. The more I thought about it, though, the more it fit for a better reason than convenience. Phoenix isn't actually a practical city. Building a sprawling metropolis in the middle of a desert doesn't make much sense on paper. Almost none of the water we have here falls from the sky. It gets piped in, largely from the Colorado River, which is dealing with its own long drought.
The city itself was never built with restraint; it just kept spreading outward, using more than the desert can really supply. But living in it does demand restraint from the people who actually stay here: you learn to use less, save more, plan for scarcity as a matter of course. That's closer to who Roz actually is than ‘practical’ ever was. She's not careful because the world around her rewards carefulness. She's careful because the desert trained her to be, even though the city she lives in never learned the same lesson.
The story needed Phoenix for the second half too, not just the setup. Once mysterious photos start appearing on Roz's phone, her own face at the Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal, the Maasai Mara, the contrast only works because of where she started. If she'd already been the kind of person who traveled, the photos wouldn't threaten anything. They'd just be photos It's specifically because she's spent so long conserving, saving for a rainy day that almost never comes in the desert, that the sudden appearance of everywhere else in the world doesn't read as a strange curiosity. It reads as a dare, proof that she'd been sitting on more life than she'd ever let herself spend. That's what finally gets her moving.
