I wake up from a nap to cob-webbed lightning and root-pulling thunder. I slip on some shoes, because it's not raining yet.
A middle-aged woman washes her car. She's strangling a rag in one hand, a bucket in the other. No soap, no bra, no rain.
A grandfather leans on his veranda railing as he looks at an ugly hotel, because that's where his veranda faces. His belly slumps over the railing.
Pots and pans rattle and cackle. There's no talking, no music, and no TV blaring through the open windows. Dinner's a long way off.
A lady yells at three kids. No, three terriers. She's unbraiding their leashes, but they keep knotting them back up. It might rain any second now.
An old man with a tan and red shorts walks downhill. He yells "Yeah, yeah. Sure thing. But like I said, the thing about that –" into a phone a foot away from his head.
A family walks uphill, all in swimsuits, fresh from the beach. Not totally dry, holding folded towels over their heads in case it finally rains.
Here's a pudgy guy with an umbrella unsnapped, but also unopened. His pants look like jeans from far away, but aren't jeans close up.
Here's a pair of women in lovely swishing dresses, maybe mother and daughter. One of them is still lovely close up, but it's still not raining yet.
Up in the sky, a single seagull spins with stiff wings, the way seagulls never do – flung like a boomerang the wrong way.
On the paving stones, pigeons huddle closer than strangers, but not as close as lovers (whether it's raining or not).
When it does start to rain, a grandmother will have already pulled in the laundry. Her pajama-clad grandchildren will still be chasing each other.
When it starts raining, all these fliers under windshield wipers will be illegible and unread, instead of just unread, all because of the rain.
The clouds are low and close, smeared across the sky, gray and blue, silver and yellow. A lot of them hang over the ocean, which is already as wet as it can get.
Then I'm back at home, but it hasn't rained yet.