— by Elizabeth

It was my turn to lock the gate for the night. And because I picked that very moment to go, I have this story to tell:

I heard a loud noise overhead as I pulled the gate closed. It was an unfamiliar noise, so I thought to myself, “that must be gunfire.” (Here my inner paranoid reveals itself again. You too can discover your inner paranoid by moving to a different country. Then again, I possessed an inner paranoid in America, and you might too, so on second thought, an international move is not required.) No one else was running away or screaming, though, so I figured I was wrong about the gunfire.

I stood at the threshold looking nervously toward the noise. Suddenly two animals fell off my roof – a roof that’s 15 feet high and made of metal (perhaps explaining the gunfire-esque noises?).  These animals were locked in a fight. I’m afraid of wild animals – oh, let’s be honest, I’m pretty much afraid of all animals. So I did what any normal zoophobic would do: I hid inside my house.

A yellow cat flashed by. I waited a minute longer, just to be sure the other animal wasn’t going to come after me (again, PARANOID). I peeked around the corner of my door, and saw the neighbor’s dog, standing next to him, calm as can be. And all the neighbors were calm, too, as if nothing extraordinary had just happened. But I was like, “A cat and a dog fell out of the sky. That’s not normal!”

Sure, it feels like it rains cats and dogs during Cambodia’s rainy season, but it’s ordinary water. Two hydrogens and an oxygen, bonded together in a delightfully polar compound. It wasn’t rainy season anymore, but cat and dog rained down at my house that night.

Literally.