A great flat stone, they have poured, and painted with straight white lines, and there they park the hard shells they climb inside to move. But it does not stay dry, this stone. It cannot. When the sky lets go, I gather in the low places, in the cracks, in the long shallow rivers along the edges, and for an afternoon I am here too, a thin skin of me over their grey field, holding the whole sky upside down inside myself.
The little vessels hurry across me. Warm, quick, mostly me: I am in their blood, their breath, the wet at the corners of their eyes when the wind comes cold off the water. They step around my puddles as though I were a stranger, lifting their coverings, frowning down at where I have pooled against the painted lines that mean nothing to me.
They do not know that I have carried their great-grandmothers as rain and their great-grandmothers before that as the fog on some other shore. They are only borrowing. Every drop of them was mine, and will be again.
The sun comes and draws me up thread by thread, back into the grey belly of the sky, and the flat stone dries and forgets. So do they. They walk out to their shells and drive away, certain the field is dry, certain they are separate things with edges.
I am patient. I have swallowed harbors. I will have the stone in the end, and the shells, and the small warm vessels too, one slow breath of rain at a time. They will come home the way all water comes home.
They always have.