The Average Rainfall in Detroit

By Maria Maniaci

Tony likes J-Horror and foreign bikes and Ethiopian food and this weird day-glo lime green soda they only sell in gas stations. He turns his nose up at pop rock in favor of French talk shows on iTunes radio, even though he can't know more than three words of French.

But give him the choice of every ice cream flavor in Baskin Robbins, and Tony will always pick vanilla. Every time. He never even options up for the sugar cone.

I had to think there was something to that. Some meta to why Tony was with me. He'd stayed around longer anyone else. There had to be some catch to it.

So I kept poking at it, until all the wrong answers lay strewn around like sodden leaves.

You don't get it, he said. You don't understand. You'll never change.

Nothing changes but the seasons, I told him.

You're wrong, he said, as he walked away.

No, I'm right. See?
































We once convinced him to ask a waiter for a box of slender-regular tampons when what he really wanted was a cup of ginger root tea. He bitched for about five minutes when he caught on. Then he started laughing. On the way back to the car, he blew me in an alley between a dry cleaners and a Christian Science Reading Room. That's Tony.



































I was leaning against the Christian Science Reading Room. It was raining in Detroit that night.



Maria Maniaci is pursuing her Master's in Creative Writing at Wayne State University in Detroit. Her fiction has appeared in Flashing in the Gutters and Doorknobs & Bodypaint, and she was the grand prize winner of the 2005 Metro Times Summer Fiction Contest.