A long, long time ago there was a cloud. Just the one. It floated above the people of the world, back and forth, and the people waved. That was about all the interaction the cloud had with the human people. Or with any kind of people for that matter.
You see, the cloud was alone.
Yes, the cloud was alone and no amount of thin air conjured cartoon people or alien people or other cloud people would change that because those people were imaginary – which most essentially means that they didn’t talk back.
And that was about it for the cloud. And it got to be too much. The floating. The aloneliness.
So, the cloud started to cry. And the human people below watched the tears that they’d never seen before start falling and they started running and shouting at other people to run away! but there were so many people shouting and screaming and shrieking that nobody could understand what anybody was saying and lots of people were sobbing boohoo! and the general cacophony sounded something like, RRAAAAIIIIN!!!! BBOOOO!!
And this went on for a long time. A long, long time.
Until finally, a little boy looked at his dad and then climbed up on top of his shoulders and started waving his hands. First, the people next to him stopped screaming to look and wonder. Then more people stopped. Then more. Eventually, everyone in the world stopped and looked at the boy and he said, “I’m going up there to fix it.” He looked down at his dad, who nodded, and so the little boy kept talking. “I’m bringing my special arrow and my cool bow and I’m going to shoot the heart of the cloud with light. I think that’ll fix it.”
When the boy stopped talking he reached into the bag on his dad’s back and pulled out the bow and arrow he was talking about and so everybody cheered and then his dad said, “Ready?” and the boy said, “Ready.”
And his dad threw him into the sky.
And he sped up past the tears and burst through the first layer of the cloud into a shattering whiteness which stopped his momentum and felt a lot like cotton candy. He slowed to a halt and felt around. He was kind of sitting and kind of leaning on a dense shelf of cloud within the cloud. The whiteness underneath him was solid, and he grabbed a piece and sniffed it and it smelled a lot like cotton candy. The whiteness everywhere else, above and around and beside him, was not solid. It was airy and he wasn’t sure if it would hold his weight, but this being an adventure, he decided to go for it and he jumped. He floated gently downward until he landed on more cushiony cloud material, and from there he started walking. And he took a bite of the cloud stuff in his hand and it tasted a lot like…you guessed it.
After a while though, the walking and the searching and the cotton candy eating all became rather monotonous and the boy realized the cloud was much bigger than he’d ever guessed. He wasn’t sure if he would be able to find the heart, which was where he had hoped to shoot his arrow to begin his invasion of light. In fact, he had begun to suspect the cloud didn’t even have a heart and then that was when it happened. He stepped through a weak spot in the cloud floor below him and he started to fall into the sky.
Back in the cloud, everything had been soft and safe and dry. Now the boy was soaking wet (because the cloud was still crying its lonely tears) and not safe at all (because of the tremendous distance between him and the ground).
But.
He still had his bow and his arrow and now that he was out of the dense and dark whiteness of cloud, he had a plan.
Because above him was the cloud, and above the cloud, peeking through, was the sun. So, all he needed was just…the right…angle…
…and the boy let the arrow fly!
It splattered a few tears in his face as he fell backwards toward the crowd of human people and he could hear them crying RRAAAAIIIIN!!!! BBOOOO!!!! but he couldn’t see because of the cloud tears in his eyes and he could only hope that the arrow was true, that it was flying higher and higher and back through the broken part of the cloud through which he’d fallen and out through the top and perfectly in line with the sun so that the light could explode the darkness and make the cloud less alone…
When the boy opened his eyes, he was still falling.
The cloud was still crying, but not as much.
The sun was still shining, but even more than before.
And the colors were radiant – which most essentially means awesome.
From so far below, the people couldn’t see much. But what they could see was that the cloud was hardly crying at all anymore, so most of them stopped screaming, and they could see a splash of color across the sky, and the shadow of the little boy falling with his bow bending like the colors above.
When his dad caught him with a manly oomph, the little boy laughed and all the human people cheered because although the cloud would maybe indeed continue to feel sad sometimes, it wasn’t alone. The cloud had the sun. The sun had light. And together, they would bring color to the sky.
Oh, and it wasn’t until later that evening, after the little boy had gone to sleep, that some grownup human people sitting around trying to figure it all out, and someone said, “I think we need a new word for the tears that were falling from the sky today, so I made up a word based on what we were all screaming.” Here the grownup paused importantly. “The new word is: rain.” And everybody said ooh and aah because that was a very good new word.
And then somebody else tried to think of something important and succeeded and said, “We also need a new word for the color in the sky! Something to remember this day! Some word that captures the memory…” So, they thought about it for a while, and they all thought very important thoughts, and some people suggested some important names like bowrain and rowbain and bainrow and someone kept shouting, “What about flub?” and no one was really satisfied until the little boy’s dad cleared his throat and everyone one was quiet and he said, “Let’s bring it back to that word we were all screaming today – rain – but then there was that other sound too. What was it?”
And so the colors have been called a rainboo ever since.