The rain was sidelong and clever, flying at us upside-down and zig-zag, wetting places you didn’t think about, making you wish for the dryness of a bath. I hadn’t believed it was true, at first. It certainly wasn’t possible. Writing articles about nachos shaped like the Virgin Mary, everyone joked: that’s what you’ll be doing next. It seemed like a gag.

The driest place on earth, that’s tedious, but measurable. A place that’s inside isn’t even in the running. Most places it doesn’t rain inside, not proper-like. Conversation of raining inside, and you expect you’re talking to someone without a proper understanding of sprinkler systems, or of “inside”. That’s what I thought.

A color piece. A crazy eccentric. That’s what I expected. UFOs and folk art, a leaky pipe and a cracked ceiling. I pictured: everything painted blue.

The rain in Trevor Wheelock’s apartment was like nothing you’ve ever seen. Everything covered in tarps and sealed in zip-log bags and garbage bags or dissolving into the floor. Plastic furniture. It was raining when they built the house, Trevor said, and it hadn’t stopped since.

A while ago it had stopped raining on the second floor, Trevor said, which was just uncanny. I thought I saw a fish, out of the corner of my eye. It might have been Doris.