Away

It was a kind of winter but one without cold, or ice, or snow. It was an indistinct winter, impossible to demarcate form the preceeding fall or coming spring. There was only the rain, the constant rain that arrive at the end of a drought that had lasted all of that previous season and most of the summer before. For Jeremy the winter of that year began with the first rain that anyone had seen in a long time. He had been standing outside of a corporate coffee shop in the early morning. The sun was shining, a man crossed the road with a yappie little dog that kept looking back at something then up toward the sky. He felt a drop on his hand and looked up. Nothing. Through the columns of concrete only blue and the old sunlight of dawn, fake old movie sepia. Then another and then the rain. Not a downpour and not a drizzle, it was the slow seduction of an old lover. The rain slipped into the world again as though it had never left, without announcing its return it closed the door. It hung up its hat. Shit, thought Jeremy. No fucking umbrella.