the earth within;

川

It was the rain that washed him anew; the sputtering roof breaking bells in his brain. From downstairs, piano notes stumbled up a scale and through a song. And the stagnant air briefly moved along. He thought, “I have no stories to tell.” And in his head, a glass of water splattered on the floor, as if the rain were saying, “Say something.” “But what could I say?” he thought. “I am only one person,” he thought. “I have no stories to tell,” he thought. And the rain beat on the tiles of the roof; the rain bantered by the lips of the large jug on the porch; the rain split, skidding down car windows. And the rain poured into the river, the way short hair brushes against a pillow.