[2025-02-09]
The city is riddled with secret tunnels, all of the rain spouts and the storm drains actually lead down, down, down, deep underground to an enormous chamber where all the rainwater collects and where Old Toby lives. Old Toby is an enormous catfish the size of a bus, as well as the God of Rain. Specifically he is the god of heavy, pelting rain, the kind of rain which saturates the land and turns all the soil to mud and gets under the eves and washes all the dust off the windowpanes and rinses the air clean, so that when you go outside the following morning and smell the air, it's a good smell. There are other gods for the other types of rain but Old Toby doesn't know them. Mostly Old Toby just sleeps, and waits, and dreams. In a not-too-distant future the waters will rise, and flow back up out of the gutters and the drains and the spouts and disgorge a hundred years' worth of garbage and dirt, all the plastic wrappers and the heavy metals and the cigarette butts, it'll all get washed away until the water flows clear, and it won't be salt water but fresh, and it will smell like mud and algae and river water and Old Toby, and he will swim through the streets and among the buildings and feel through the cracks and the windows with his long, long whiskers as he passes, and he will remember the shape of everything we have made and our world will drift like the current through the impenetrable eddies of his ancient catfish mind. He will understand it all in some way which is entirely unintuitive to us, we who live on land and breathe air, and it will all be just as true. Old Toby knows the secrets of silt and slow accumulation. He knows how things drift down to the bottom and grow and rot and become not dead, but alive in a different way. He's old enough to have seen life first come out of the oceans (he wasn't a catfish then for there were no catfish yet, he was Something Else), and he knows that someday life will return there as well. He knows the shapes that the bioelectric currents make as they twist and arc invisibly through the water collumn, pushed around by microcurrents and imperceptable changes in dissolved mineral content. He knows it all. He knows that the whole world is but a flake of shedding skin upon the back of Old Toby, a grain of sand drifting downstream. He knows where it's all going, and he knows how it's going to end. He knows that all rivers, in time, run to the sea. Old Toby sleeps, and dreams, and in his dream he winks one enormous catfish eye, and in his dream, he laughs.