Three hours short of night; the fulcrum of the evening. All that hot day the city felt looped, rewound. Thirty-four degrees and the foundations grew sticky. Clouds passed, thundered. Somewhere there must have been lightning, must have been rain. In the centre the shops were closed, the aisles empty, billboards smiling at nothing but pigeons. The sun was a copper hollow pressed into the sky. Then, while it was still light, another storm arrived.
I was at my desk, wrapping up my final tasks of the day, a rattling fan a few feet from my face. I heard the rumbles, between the clacks and clicks of the motor shaking itself to pieces. They conducted through the old beams of the house, rattled the wooden windowframes, the bass mingling with the soundsystems of passing cars.
A few minutes later the thunder ceased. A purple flash came from the west. I swivelled to the window and looked out to sweltering tarmac, yellow grass. An unreadable sky, lit from nowhere. The rain began to fall. Someone in the street whooped: it had been weeks. The smell of wetted dust. A blade of water, the air parting, palms opening wide.
Alexander James 