Fourteen Days.

What I can tell you is that the light's lower, the evening comes on sooner, the air's drier. The color of the sunshine is sliding across the spectrum from that midsummer sandblasted white to the viscous yellow I always miss so badly, welcome back so readily—the color that tricks you, if you're sitting at your kitchen table, into believing that the temperature out there will be something entirely other than what it is, which is hotter than you'd expect, a kind of almost-summer, a placeholder. We remain firmly anchored to the not-season. Even the birds seem confused.

The fancies say change arrives bearing clouds and rain and cooler temps by midweek, but I'm having trouble signing up for any new religion right now—we've sacrificed all the goats and virgins in this village, and it's still been fourteen days since it rained. Two weeks. An actual fortnight. You might say it's time to switch over, chant at the golden calf a little, howl at the moon, but I say: let's not piss the lesser gods off any more than we already have. Do you want another fourteen days? You do not. You've done everything you know how to do, so just hold tight and wait it out—let the corn go to seed in the fields, toss the cup of bones on the ground and read from it what you will, but when the rain comes later on, if it does ever come, just say thank you, and trust in the knowledge that it was that last virginal goat you tossed over the edge into the fiery caldera that did it, and it just took a few days for your account to get credited, is all.

Warm, they're calling this on the radio. Warm. If the NPR person tells me one more time that I can get a new whatever kind of chair in its new color, True Black, at whatever.com, and that it's going to be warm tomorrow—if she says that one more time, I may pilot the truck into a tree. It will never rain again. Every day for the rest of our lives is going to be this day. To dust we shall return.