Measured on a dry Thursday, six days after the rain that filled it, the puddle at the base of the driveway apron held roughly two centimeters of water across an oval about the size of a dinner plate, down from four centimeters on the day of the storm but nowhere near gone. Its neighbors, the sidewalk cracks, the curb lip, the flat stretch by the mailbox cluster, had all dried by day two. This one holds because the asphalt beneath it settled slightly, years ago, into a shallow bowl invisible to the eye but perfectly legible to water, which finds every low point a road surface pretends it doesn't have.
It performs its role with total consistency: a mirror for streetlights at night, a mosquito nursery by the third warm day, a minor obstacle course for anyone wheeling out a trash bin without looking down. Leaves collect at its edge and darken there, held against the curb by the same slope that holds the water. In freezing weather it becomes something else entirely: a thin sheet of ice, often invisible against gray asphalt, that has caught more than one person off guard on the way to a car. Neighbors have mentioned it to the city twice, according to no official record, and the depression remains, filling and draining on its own schedule, indifferent to whoever is late for work and stepping around it.