When it rains at the Buffalo Colony, your senses come out.

There’s the sound of it hitting the leaves. Hitting the wood decks. Hitting the bungalows’ gutters. The puddles. The pool. The hollowness from inside the casino.

One is a hard, unrelenting splatter like the first time a man’s piss hits the toilet bowl. The other is like the sizzling of garlic and onion on that first throw into hot olive oil.

It looks like it’ll never stop. It comes down so hard, in sheets, like shooting stars you keep catching a second too late, just looking whole like lines. On the skylights, it’s like watching lottery balls dance and pop like corn. Disco-ball white-light flashing so fast you feel like it’s all in fast-forward.

You smell the tar of the horseshoe, the collective dirt from the gardens, and a bit of someone else’s dinner.

There’s always that forgotten one bicycle. Looking helpless, hapless.

You wear a yellow raincoat. The one you don’t [want to] wear in Brooklyn because you look five in it. The one that can’t be bunched into a ball and thrown, no matter how hard you try to compress it. The one that says FLATOW in sharpie because you packed it your first summer at camp.

It lets up before you’ve had enough of it. Before you can stop imagining what else it resembles, what else it makes you think about.

And then it really stops. And it’s back to the whirling hum of the box fan, the one drip hitting a bucket from somewhere you can’t see, and the birds. Louder than ever.

Screen door slams.