source: above your head· ~46 db· duration: hours, or all night
each drop is a small hard tk — slate has none of the cushion of thatch or lead. heard from below, what arrives is not the individual drop but the shape of a thousand drops together, a soft grey static that fills the eaves and presses gently on the air of the room. inside that static there are moments of pattern: a faster drumming above the chimney, a slow counting along the gutter.
around it: a single bare bulb if there is one, more often only the attic window open a half-inch onto the weather. the trunks and boxes go quieter than they usually are, as if listening with you. the rain outside has been falling since before the building was built; tonight it is only doing what it does, on a roof that knows it.
it stops, sometimes, in a way that is more startling than its beginning: a slow thinning, then a single last drop that takes its time, and then the silence after, in which the slates cool with small tinks of their own, like a long held breath being let out one tile at a time.