The rain falls in sheets, in veils, while we sit on the screened porch swatting flies.
We spent the afternoon talking about flowers, though I all I could recall was the hyacinth garden from a poem I'd read at an impressionable age. I don't even know what hyacinths look like, I said. "They're very beautiful," she replied, to pass the time.
We moved onto politics, stirred packets of sugar into our coffee, while the water made puddles in the garden path, reflecting a bruised sky.
 "Politics are best left to the rich and handsome," a woman I'd once wanted to sleep with said.

Small packs of tattered clouds are hung like clothes across the sky. We talked about our dreams. She said that once, as a small child, she'd dreamed of being an astronaut, of walking upside down on a planet of her own.
All my dreams are in silver, and I hoard them in the recesses of my mind. And when I wake up in the morning, I close my eyes and swim back through the silvery light of them, flickering like fish or light on a garden path.

The conversation has ended. We are all leaving for the afternoon, making plans to see each other after the season has changed. All of us are excellent liars.