Emma’s dream shifted; someone was tap-dancing. Clickety, clickety, click—her unconscious heard the rain as time-steps. In the small yard, squirrels chittered to one another about the falling water. Would it wash away the nuts they’d hidden so carefully in the redwood siding that covered the small two-story house? They’d tucked reserves into its red shutters too, and around the edges of the now screened-in carport where in summer the Trees potted begonias and barbequed. Would it wash away the ivy they’d watched Emma plant beneath the back of the house where the house stood on stilts? The rain ran in torrents down the single-lane twisting road that led to the house. It wiped out the tracks of pickup trucks lugging in cords of wood for the canyon’s fireplaces. It washed them down into the creek that flowed out of the canyon, under the highway, into the reservoir. It scrubbed the large windows that paraded across the back of the Trees’ bedroom, cleaning the outside where Emma couldn’t reach, for the land dropped off there and she’d need a ladder fifty feet tall.
