Dust on the Leaves

Merrick has kept rainfall tallies for sixty years. In a normal dry year the ditches crack first and the apples shrink later. This summer both happened the same week, like the water was cut off somewhere upstream.

The numbers in his ledger are worse than wrong. He has days marked wet when the ground was dust. Days marked dry when moss was still green on the north wall. He keeps writing anyway because stopping would mean admitting he has no idea what is happening.

The orchard workers still haul baskets because hunger does not pause for mystery. Merrick pays in coin and dried fruit and the kind of silence that means he is ashamed the sky failed before his trees did.

Tarowen Square takes the fruit and returns gossip: traders smashing gauges, a mill country that counts water disappearing between stations, whispers about a cult that wants drought to stay. Merrick copies what he hears into the same ledger as the rain.

People leaving for Tarowen do not just carry apples. They carry his question: if the rain stopped, who told it to? And whether anyone walking east will come back with an answer the ledger can believe.