Robby stood by the balcony railing as the small car went on its way, swallowed up beyond the bend in the road at the boardwalk. For a moment he looked at the gloomy, thickening sky, and felt his throat contract. Why was he working harder than ever today, in a sort of desperate fervor, to take down license plate numbers? He hurried to dip his pen in the ink well placed on the railing, and wrote, and wrote and wrote … He’d missed only one car. Not bad.
Suddenly a drop landed on his head. He looked up once again, and was hit by another drop, straight in his eye. Then another on the tip of his nose. The first rain. Robby ran inside and announced all through the house, “It’s raining! The rain is here!”
The notebook was left on the railing, and the rain splattered over the numbers, the water blurred the ink, blurred the shapes, erased everything.
A gust of wind blew the notebook off the railing, and the soggy mess fell to the ground.
The summer was washed off the city streets. Winter came to Alexandria.