A guy tries to work up the nerve to come out to his parents despite a lack of support from his sister and, you know, that thing where it rains when you lie.

(from Tor.com)

The water that falls on you from nowhere when you lie is perfectly ordinary, but perfectly pure. True fact. I tested it myself when the water started falling a few weeks ago. Everyone on Earth did. Everyone with any sense of lab safety anyway. Never assume any liquid is just water. When you say “I always document my experiments as I go along,” enough water falls to test, but not so much that you have to mop up the lab. Which lie doesn’t matter. The liquid tests as distilled water every time.

Uttering “this sentence is false” or some other paradox leaves you with such a sense of angst, so filled with the sense of an impending doom, that most people don’t last five seconds before blurting something unequivocal. So, of course, holding out for as long as possible has become the latest craze among drunk frat boys and hard men who insist on root canals without an anesthetic. Psychologists are finding the longer you wait, the more unequivocal you need to be to ever find solace.

This story won the 2014 Hugo Award for Best Short Story, and that’s a good call, I say. Hugo = sci-fi/fantasy; here the sci-fi is not subtle, but not integral either. It’s a device so absurd and so natural it doesn’t feel exactly like a device. The new normal is that it rains icy cold indoors when you lie (or when you say something know isn’t true?). Not sure why. It’s weird, but you get used to it, or accept it. I want to know more about the science or the scientific guesswork about this emotional precipitation, but I’m left wanting because this is really a story about man trying to be honest about who he is with his family. That stuff is a lot of why this story works, and it’s not at all sci-fi.

Read it here.