There was something came after raining
The sky bled on the seventh day.
Rain fell without anyone asking for it. Six days. When the water swallowed the houses, the city did not look at the sky. It looked at the hill.
The lightning came down blue and split the earth open. Half the hill collapsed. Beneath the mud and the dead, it appeared.
Black. Four meters of nothing. The stone.
At first they talked about the missing houses. By the third day, nobody did. Only the stone. The ten o’clock news dedicated fifteen minutes to the dead and the disappeared. On minute sixteen, the reporter asked if the stone was a god.
Everyone nodded.
I did too.
Not because I believed. Because I wanted to.
The idea of touching it consumed me. Of standing near a god. Even a dead one.
People started climbing the hill at night. Quietly. Alone. Some came back crying. Some laughing. Some never came back at all. The city stopped asking questions after a while. That was the worst part. Not the disappearances. The acceptance.
My dreams dragged me there before dawn.
I climbed what remained of the hill while the city slept beneath floodwater and broken lights. There were no fences. No police. No soldiers guarding the crater.
Nobody wanted to stand near it for long.
The air changed as I got closer. Not colder. Thinner. Like the world itself was holding its breath.
The god of stone waited in the center of the crater.
Everything sent there to clear the landslide was still around it. Excavators. Trucks. Floodlights. Motionless. Dark. As if they had simply stopped in the middle of their work and never started again.
And the stone was there.
A giant rock. Perfect.
No cracks. No marks. No shape carved by nature. It looked smooth from every angle, wrong in a way my eyes could not explain. Like something too large trying to imitate a stone after only hearing the word described once.
I walked toward it.
Then people began appearing around me.
Silent. Still.
Men. Women. Old people. Children.
I had not heard them approach. They simply emerged from the darkness between one blink and the next, forming a path toward the crater.
Their faces looked empty. Peaceful.
Like sleepwalkers waiting for permission to wake up.
“Touch it,” they said.
All at the same time.
And they stepped aside.
I should have run.
Instead, I placed my hand against the stone.
It was warm.
My eyes lifted toward the sky.
And then higher.
And farther beyond.
Past the clouds.
Past the dark.
Into the place where the stone god truly was.
And I saw it.
I saw something large enough to make the sky look small.
Something watching through the shape buried beneath the hill.
Something that had noticed me touching it.
I saw mouths opening inside stars.
I saw black oceans moving between worlds.
And I understood, in one terrible instant, that the stone in the crater was not the god.
It was only the finger.
Pointing upward.
Toward the thing that is still looking at me now.