The Last Week Of June

There's no other sound in the whole world, just the slapping of her sandals on the empty sidewalk. And even that doesn't last long, the warm wet air smothers it and it disappears into the summer quiet of a heat wave afternoon. In the momentary darkness of her shadow the pavement cools for a second, then heats up again as she moves on, the instant of relief coming and leaving so fast there's no time to appreciate it. The thought makes her laugh, one short sound that might have been bitter, or sad, or just accepting of the truth of that metaphor.

She kept walking south, the ocean on her right and the town on the hill on her left. At the center of town she walked out to the middle of the street, stood on the yellow line. She flickered like a ghost, in the heat shimmer rising from the pavement. She took a cigarette from her t shirt pocket and lit it, took a long deep drag. Right now she really needed to feel defiant and rebellious, and she really, really didn't want to cry. Not here, not now. She put the cigarette between her lips and squinted against the smoke, against the tears. She stuffed her lighter in the back pocket of her jeans and started walking. And she prayed she'd never pass this way again.

Rain

Rain again, rattling like pebbles in a tin can, hissing lonely in the empty streets of friday night. Nobody's even watching because they're all so tired of it. The rain is tired of itself, so it spends its time dreaming.

In its dream each raindrop is a grain of warm dry sand, floating down to the dry streets, rolling along the dry curb stones and making sand rivers that sound like the memory of a snare drum as they pour into the storm drains. Sand puddles fill the low spots in the streets like the opposite of tide pools and wait for someone to jump in and splash them empty. Sand is rolling down windows and walls, and making dunes in the empty parks.

The rain's happy inside its dream. In here there's no cold and wet, just bright sunshine on hot yellow sand. In here the grains are polishing each other bright as they roll down the dry warm streets. In here nobody hates the rain.