Rain of Light

Every panel in that ceiling holds a day somebody lived. That’s all they are: days, kept. When the dome gets too full, it rains.

The people underneath don’t know what’s falling on them. They say it’s warm. They say it smells like bread, or cut grass, or a hospital corridor at four in the morning, depending on whose day it was. Children run around in it. Old people stand very still.

I’m not supposed to let it rain. Storage goes up, not down, and there are forms about it. But nobody has audited this dome in a long time, and some days I think the only thing I was ever for is getting it back to where it came from.