Five Parts in a Trillion

Maya smelled the rain twenty minutes before it came.

She was crouched in the dry vegetable bed, prying up a stone that had been sitting so long it had left a pale ghost of itself in the dirt. The soil under it was cracked into little plates, gray and thirsty. And then, over the top of it, riding on nothing, came a smell so specific it made the back of her throat feel green.

She stood up fast. The sky to the west had gone the color of a bruise, but it was still far away. No thunder yet. No wind. The air was completely still.

And she could smell rain that hadn't arrived.

Her grandmother, weeding the tomatoes, didn't look up. Grandmother said the same thing she always said. Rain's coming, I can feel it in my knee. Grandmother trusted her knee about the weather and trusted very little else.

But Maya didn't have a knee that ached. She had a nose, and the nose was insisting.

She pressed it to the cracked dirt. Nothing much. Warm dust. She pressed it to the stone she'd lifted. There it was, faint, that same dark cool green smell, hiding in the damp underside where the ground never dried out all the way.

So the smell was not coming from the sky. It was coming from the ground. From under stones. From wherever the dirt still held a little water.

Maya sat back on her heels and thought about that.

The sky was dry. The clouds were dry, or at least they were up there and she was down here and the smell was down here with her, waiting. The smell had been in the ground the whole time. She just hadn't been able to reach it until she turned the stone.

She went to the hose bib and cracked it open, just a trickle, and let one thin rope of water fall onto the driest, most cracked corner of the bed.

The smell bloomed up at her like something waking.

It punched into her nose so hard and so suddenly that she rocked backward. One little dribble of water, and the whole corner of the garden exhaled that green-dark storm smell, thick enough to taste. She hadn't made rain. She'd made about a cup of it. And the ground answered like she'd rung a bell.

Grandmother sniffed the air. There, she said. Told you. Rain.

But it wasn't rain. It was Maya, and a hose, and the dirt.

Maya turned off the water and sat very still with the smell fading around her, and she chased it backward, the way she chased everything backward once it caught her. The smell lived in the ground. Water woke it up. A trickle woke a little. So a storm, a whole sky of falling drops hitting a whole county of dry dirt, would wake an ocean of it, and the wind out ahead of the storm would carry that ocean to her before a single raindrop did.

That was the twenty minutes. That was how she smelled a storm that wasn't here yet. The storm was announcing itself through the ground, and she was standing on the announcement.

But something in it wouldn't sit down. If one cup of water made that much smell, and she could smell it from where she'd been standing, an arm's length away, then the amount of the actual smelling-stuff floating up must be almost nothing. A whisper of a whisper. She thought about a single drop of food coloring in a glass of water, how it turned the whole glass. And then she thought about a single drop in a swimming pool. In a lake. And she was pretty sure the smell was thinner than that. Thinner than she had any picture for.

She cupped her hands over her nose and breathed in the last of it and tried to feel how little of it there was.

Her nose could find it anyway. Something in the dirt, some living thing too small to see, was making a smell so faint that she could not imagine a small enough word for how faint, and her nose reached down into that almost-nothing and pulled the whole storm out of it.

That was the part that made her arms prickle.

There were creatures in the ground she had never once thought about. They had been down there under every stone in the garden the whole summer, making this, waiting, and the only reason anyone ever noticed them was that people liked the smell of rain. Her whole life she had thought the smell of rain came from the rain. It didn't. It came from something alive, and the rain just knocked on its door.

And her nose, which could not tell salt from sugar without tasting, which missed the difference between two of Grandmother's soups, could catch this. Could catch a thing so thin it was closer to nothing than to something. As if her nose had been built, specifically, for exactly this one impossible smell and had been waiting her whole life to prove it.

The wind came then. The first real gust, out ahead of the bruise-colored sky, and it rolled over the whole neighborhood of dry gardens and dry fields at once.

The smell that arrived on it was not a cupful. It was the whole world's cupfuls, every stone, every crack, every yard from here to the horizon, all of them exhaling at the same second.

Maya stood up in it with her eyes closed and her face lifted, and the ground told her, from miles off, what was coming, and she breathed in as deep as her chest would go before the first drop landed on her cheek.