I never deliver to the Hollis place unless it's raining. That's the rule. Doesn't matter if the paper's soaked through and useless by the time it hits the step. If the sky's dry, I skip number 14 and move on to 16.
Three weeks ago, on a dry Tuesday, I skip it anyway. Or I mean to. I'll get to that.
Mrs Okafor at the shop pays me in cash, folded notes in a rubber band. I count them twice because she once shorted me two pounds and neither of us ever mentioned it again, and I've counted twice ever since, out of habit more than suspicion. I'm doing that now, on the low wall outside 16, when the door of 14 opens.
No one's supposed to be home. The bins haven't moved in months.
But there's a woman in the doorway, cardigan buttoned wrong, watching me count.
"You missed us," she says.
"It's not raining," I say, like that's an answer she'll accept.
She looks up at the sky, dry as bone, and says, "It will be," and goes back inside.
That night it rains for four hours. I check the app twice, for no reason I can explain, just to see the little cloud icon confirm it.
Today it's raining too, thin and cold, the kind that gets under your collar in the first minute. I've done Elm Row and I'm coming up on Foxglove Lane, where the gutters need clearing and always smell like wet moss. Somebody's cat sits under the hedge at number 9 no matter the weather, and it watches me the whole length of the road, and I have never once seen it move. Number 14 has its curtains open, which they never are. I fold the paper the way I always do, wet already, and go up the path.
The letterbox sticks. Has done for two years, ever since I took over the round from the boy who did it before me. He told me the rule and nothing else, like it was something you inherited along with the bike. I push the paper through anyway, working it past the brush inside, and feel it catch on something that isn't the brush.
I look through the gap.
The hallway light is on. A woman is sitting on the stairs, halfway up, the way you'd sit if you got tired partway and just stopped there. She's got the cardigan on, buttoned wrong the same way. She isn't looking at the door. She's looking into the front room, at something I can't see from this angle, and her hands are flat on her knees like she's waiting to be told she can move.
I knock. She doesn't turn.
I go back to the shop and Mrs Okafor doesn't ask why I'm early. She just counts out my money, four pound coins and the rest in silver, into my palm, slow, like she's giving herself time to decide something.
"That address," she says, not looking up from the till. "You know why we only run it on wet days."
I say I don't, actually. No one ever told me why. Only that it's the rule.
She slides the drawer shut. "Because on dry days nobody answers. And on wet days somebody does. And you don't want to be the one who finds out which is worse."
I don't ask what she means. I go home and I don't think about it properly, not until the following Tuesday, which is dry, bone dry, no cloud for miles, and the round sheet on the counter at the shop has 14 Foxglove Lane crossed out in Mrs Okafor's handwriting, and beside it, one word: skip.
The paper from that wet Thursday is still there when I do the round again a week later. It's sitting on the mat behind the glass of the door, unopened, curling at the corner where the damp got in and never quite dried out. I don't push another one through. I don't think I will again, rain or no rain, though nobody's told me to stop, and nobody's crossed the house off the sheet for good.
"Terraced houses in Avon Gorge" by Bex.Walton is licensed under CC BY 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/.