Water dripped from the 13th floor's fire escape onto Clio's head. Droplets rolled down the side of her face as she stared down through the metal at the street below her. As she watched, a young man stuck his head out of a window only a few floors below her. He quinted up at her through the rain; he looked tired. Without even waving, he puled his head back inside his window and shut it. She wasn't sure what his name was. This didn't surprise her. She wasn't actually sure what many of her neighbors were called. They all seemed a bit strange and poor. The only person in her building she associated with was her brother, and he even seemed a bit too much like these people for her taste. She would probably look must saner if she had something to be smoking while sitting out here. It would give her a reason to be sitting in the rain; people understood that smoking inside would make one's apartment smell. Or perhaps just an umbrella would do. Normally at this time of day she would be at work. After the other night, however, she had decided to take a little break from work to catch up on her painting. A gallery had looked at some of her work a few weeks ago and was thinking about having her as part of an exhibit about young artists in the city. The break in had given her the perfect excuse to close down for a week without anyone getting mad at her for falling having to cancel their orders. It was all a lie, of course. Nothing had actually been stolen. The shop had only been ransacked. Everything was torn apart and sifted through, but none of it had taken more than a day to clean up. The police weren't sure why the perpetrator had bothered to break in in the first place. They figured that he or she had probably been interrupted in the middle of the act and had had to leave before taking anything. The thing that had seemed oddest to her, though, was that whoever it was hadn't even touched the cash register, but the contents of her filing cabinet were spread across the shop floor. She dismissed this thought. It was clearly paranoid. The popsicle she was eating tasted like rain. Mm, blue raspberry and water... She sucked the last of the ice off of the wooden stick and dropped it straight down through the metal grille of the fire escape before climbing back into her apartment through the window. She shook water onto her carpet and left wet footprints in the shag fibers as the crossed the room to check on the drying status of her painting.