The Cartography of Rain

The first drops arrive like rumors, tapping the dust awake on slate rooftops, drawing borders no one agreed to across the faces of old stone.

By noon the gutters speak in dialects— one rushes with the confidence of rivers, another stutters over bottle caps and leaves, finding its grammar as it goes.

I watched a puddle once hold the entire sky, a parliament of clouds convened in three inches of standing water, debating light until a child's boot scattered the session.

The fields accept it without comment, each furrow filling like a sentence that knows where it ends— the period of saturation, the long exhale into clay.

By evening the world has been translated into a language that gleams. Every surface answers back, and the earth, that diligent cartographer, has redrawn itself again.