The Forecast

People say you can read the sky, like it's a book. I look at the sky and I see sky.

I kept a notebook. Eleven weeks of entries. “Gray. Possibly.” “High clouds, wispy. Bad?” I checked the app afterward to see whether I'd been right, which is the opposite of reading the sky, but it still counts as reading it afterward.

A man sits on the bench outside the library every morning when I walk to get coffee. He looks up at the sky too. In September I began looking up at the same time he did. We haven't discussed it.

Some mornings he nods. Some mornings he shrugs. Once he shook his head slowly and it didn't rain. Another day he did nothing at all, and it poured on both of us.

Neither of us carries an umbrella. I don't know what he knows.

Tuesday he looked at me instead of the sky. I couldn't read that either, so I looked up for both of us.