My human owns a machine for arguing with the sky.
It lives by the door, folded and thin, a black wing pretending to be a walking stick. When the water starts falling (and the water is always the sky's business, never mine, never anything I would lower myself to touch), my human seizes this thing, presses a button, and it leaps open with a sound that would make a lesser creature bolt under the couch. I do not bolt. I simply reassess my proximity to it from a great and dignified height.
Then it walks out into the falling water holding a dome over its own head. A little roof. A portable ceiling. As though the entire apartment, with its dry corners and its warm sills and its blankets that belong to me, were not already a perfectly good roof it chose to abandon.
It comes home damp anyway. Every time. The dome protects the top of the head and betrays the shoes, the ankles, the elbows. My human stands in the entryway, dripping, folding the useless wing back down, and looks faintly proud of it. Of losing. To the sky.
I do not go out in the water. I have never lost to the sky. This is not luck. This is management.
The wet umbrella now leans in the corner, gleaming, upright, insufferable, a trophy for a battle it did not win.
I walk past it. I pause. I press my whole side against it, slow and deliberate, until it slides down the wall and clatters flat across the floor.
The sky and I understand each other. It is the only one in this house I respect.