The weekend was wet. Summer rain had largely become a thing you went elsewhere to witness. When I’d moved out here the rains came in the fall. People came out into the streets to feel it, remember it. Now, even the scent of it, even the passing cloud in front of the sun drew nothing. We’d been tricked too many times.
Rain, they’ll tell you here, is a complication. I drove the truck into a dry riverbed an hour away, until the light went. There’s nothing like that. All fossils and mica and the impression of water’s absence.
So the rain, diluted with chemicals, and dotted with weakened withering buds, pooled and rose and pooled and rose and made a stream of pollution in the street. And the people started coming back outside, clicking off the air conditioners, switching off the monitors. Putting hands back into the confluence.
by Hank Cherry
