Day Twelve, in Which Prague is Described Via Pluviā

About halfway up the Eastern European troposphere, a convective cell cycles merrily over Prague. Globules of water coalesce and become heavy enough to fall. Like cumuli Icari, they approach terminal velocity in the wintry air.

Spires come first, topped with icons baroque, medieval, renaissance, as though someone had torn out the pages of every architecture textbook in the world and stitched them into the sky with soot and snow. The spires are chased by steepled roofs obscured by slush waiting to be sluiced. A bit farther down and they’re no longer alone: a modern esoteria—knotted cables, television antennae, corrugated vents sighing industrial effluvia—gyres into they sky. Hamburger-shaped droplets (a raindrop at terminal velocity is not, in fact, teardrop-shaped, but more of a flattened, watery pâté) splatter on superannuated trelliswork and modernity’s refuse without discrimination. The lucky ones miss and find themselves flitting downward with buildings on either side. The backdrop rises, softly fluorescing a rainslick history: façades, art nouveau peccadilloes, ogives, columns, Soviet concrete. The last bit of precipitate lands and seeps into the miry slop by which the cobblestone is eclipsed.

King Wenceslas doesn’t blink as drops run down his soot-blackened face. If Wenceslas Square's post-Communist neon shroud doesn’t bother Bohemia’s patron saint, why should a little rain?