It was the eighth time it had rained.

Amara Hekekia pulled her keys from the ignition and stepped out of the car, taking care not to slam the door too loudly as she closed it. The handle was slick with fresh rainfall, like the parking lot, which had not been paved in years.

She began walking. There was little purpose in her step. The meeting would be the same as before, she was sure. The same as the seventh, and the sixth, and all the others. She had arranged it by phone the night before, spending her evening partaking in a dreary call-and-response with the answering machine on the other end. Just as she had the others, except for the first, which she had scheduled in person.

She could see the window of the building up ahead. It had yet to be cleaned since she’d begun visiting, leaving the glass dull and smeared. Amara had seen him through it each time—always the same man, sitting in a black office chair with his hands folded in his lap.

Amara reached the window, and sure enough he was there, just as she remembered him. He wore today, as he always did, a plain grey suit with a white tie at his throat. She nodded slightly, feeling entirely neutral. Weeks ago she might have felt angry. But anger had turned to annoyance, and annoyance had turned to a muted sense of boredom. And by the fifth visit even that had begun to fade.

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She knew his answer. He’d gone to the effort of rephrasing it each time, but still it was all the same. He’d say there were rules. Tell her that animals couldn’t be buried on city land the way she asked. That people couldn’t be buried on private land the way she asked. He’d ask if she would consider cremation—surely, he’d tell her, the ashes of the birds and their owner could be mixed?

They were routine by now, these weekly visits. Every part of them. The cloudy grey sky, the windshield wipers squeaking as they moved. The window and the office chair and the man’s dull, grey suit. Just another Wednesday errand. Like a run to the grocery store, and just as draining for her already tight budget. She’d known the night before, as she had since the third time she’d called, that nothing would come of the meeting. The conversation would be as dull, and as blurry a memory when it was over, as the window she stood in front of.

“I’m sorry,” she said quietly, and told herself that she spoke to no one in particular. She turned, and began to walk back toward her car. For a moment she felt a pang of melancholy, and a stinging in her nose. In her left eye a solitary tear began to well. But then there was nothing, and the stinging faded.

By the time she had reached her car, the tear had joined the raindrops on the pavement.