I was born at a point in history when there was little left to say about the rain. The geometrical roots of my condition are detailed in that recombinant text that got me through so many awful nights, although in at least a few chapters the very idea of night is occluded by the blear of rain; it doesn’t fall from above but sidewinds from the north and the reticular quadrille resembles the fishnet the rain has cast around this theoretical place. 

In the chapter, “Chairlift of Her Dotage,” an old woman wields a purple stainless steel cane. It’s an impossible scenario where she beckons the man who administers her pills and does her shopping to help her stand. It’s sad what happens to a human face in time but a faceless line like me doesn’t fear the distortion of its features.

The umbrellas in this world protrude from the walker like a tail. When the daytime sky in Michigan goes dark, these battery-powered nautical lanterns keep me thinking of a motel in Port Austin (now demolished) where one night the window screen rattled to the ground and woke my wife and me. A seiche wind blew the preceding day and a yellow rain rafted in along the coast.

Edwin Abbott Abbott, in addition to having a delightful name, had such a self-consistent mechanistic universe from which to draw his method of depthless allegorical depth, his flat, yet epiphanic language. For instance, when the father sat with the dog between two outfacing mirrors during a tornado warning, he became eternal in one story (the chapter called “The Hexagons of Spring”) and non-existent in another (the chapter titled “The King of Lineland and the Anachronistic Vortex”). At the behest of A Square, he did not walk the dog down the street after the storm for fear of impaling oncoming polygons, and this was as close to kindness as he’d ever come.