Halfway up the hill, I took shelter from the rain beneath the awning of a secondhand bookshop.
An old man I had never seen before stood beside me. He tapped the pavement lightly with the tip of his closed umbrella.
“This hill used to be under the sea,” he said.
That was all.
I did not laugh or correct him. I only drew a breath. The air still held the weight of the rain.
The old man said nothing more. Without opening his umbrella, he walked away.
Some time later, I was caught in the rain at the same place.
I stepped beneath the same awning.
The old man was there again.
This time, I spoke first.
“About what you said before…”
I paused.
“This used to be the sea, didn’t it?”
The old man did not look at me.
He kept his eyes on the ground.
After a moment, he said,
“No.”
“This was a desert.”
I looked down without thinking.
For a moment, grains of sand seemed to lie across the asphalt.
Or perhaps they had been there all along.
I could not tell.
The old man dragged the tip of his umbrella lightly over the ground.
“Look,” he said. “Sand.”
Once he said it, I could not stop seeing it.
The cracks in the concrete became clusters of fine grains. The pavement, solid a moment before, seemed to loosen in a thin, silent layer.
When I breathed in, something rough caught at the back of my throat.
Not enough to make me cough.
Enough to remain.
The old man offered no explanation.
The rain had already stopped, but the ground still looked wet.
For a while, I could not move.
I did not know when to raise my eyes.
Several minutes passed before I finally began walking.
I climbed the hill.
The ground beneath my feet felt less certain than I remembered.
I could not tell whether it was hard or about to give way.
On the way to the station, I looked down several times.
The sand was gone.
What unsettled me was not that I had seen it.
It was that I could no longer see it.
Ever since that day, whenever I walk up the hill after the rain, I look at the ground first.
I have not smelled the sea yet.
But underfoot, something remains that belongs to neither.