A rainy day in autumn is bad news for everyone. Wet shoes, carrying the umbrella, the occasional splash by a passing car ruining your day… However, Mai loved rainy days in autumn. They were the only days when she could see her friend.

On her way to high school, all attired with her dark blue raincoat, her boots and her yellow umbrella, she carefully checked every puddle she passed, but it wasn’t until later in the evening when she found him, in a small one in her street’s corner.

She waved, looking down. He waved back, from the ground. They spent a second smiling at each other, and then Mai drew a writing pad from her backpack. Having come prepared for trying, at last, to communicate with him, she first wrote something in her language, but to no one’s surprise, he shook his head in a sign of defeat. He did not speak English, as far as Mai could tell, but she was not taken aback by it. Rather, she started drawing her message. With a few sketches, she signed her companion to get something to write on himself, and he nodded and left, going beyond the borders of the puddle and showing the grey sky behind.

He came back with a yellowish paper and a banded piece of charcoal, and began drawing something. When he finished, he showed it to Mai. A head, with waves coming from its mouth, and a few symbols that flowed vertically. His language’s script, Mai supposed. She took another piece of paper, and drew the same thing, but writing “English” instead. She also added the word “head” and an arrow pointing. He answered writing his own word for head in his drawing and Mai carefully copied it and stashed it for future study.

A car came, moving the waters and almost drenching the squatting Mai. When the ripples ceased, she saw the man had written another thing and was pointing at himself. “His name!” she thought. She copied it, showed it for approval and then wrote her own, which was likewise copied by the man.

They spent almost an hour, throwing back and forth words and drawings, but eventually the night became too closed to see anything, and even if in her side there as a streetlight, in his there did not appear to be any kind of light. She wondered whether the light from her side was the only light source she had, and tried, to no avail, to get the word for “light” in his language.

Eventually she had to say goodbye. She waved, but he singed her to wait and frantically started drawing. After a minute or two, he presented Mai a piece of paper that read “next rain yes?” in sloppy handwriting. She beamed, wrote his version of “yes” in that flowy vertical script, and showed it back. They stayed looking at each other for a second, and then Mai stood up, and waved a last goodbye before returning home, without noticing that she had forgotten her pen in the sidewalk, close enough to the border that a gust of wind dropped it into the shallow puddle, which swallowed it completely as if it were a hole.