It's been raining for three days now. No patches of blue sky, just dark gray boulders of clouds. Sometimes the rain stops and everything gets really shiny, and the land looks so wet like it's been raining for a hundred days. But it doesn't take much water to saturate the rocky soil here, or to paint what were vacant lots of dirt a virile green. The grass comes out of nowhere, or the earth itself, and places I thought barren are now waving with shoots of life. I think the city's million stray cats are pissed though, because they're stuck under their garbage bins and porches, wherever it is that they live; in the days of rain I have seen only one small black cat scurrying into a garage. The rest are hidden, and wait for the sun.

The call to prayer is coming down now from the minarets, wailing like a tornado siren. It just started to hail.