The pressed heat contracts our thinking into slow-crawling spirals. Our movements are thick like mud and our words flounder listlessly, sometimes even drop, exhausted before they reach the other ears in the room. The air is waiting, tense, ready to break; like burnt umber. There are the first dim and distant growls, like waves of heat heaving over dry sand - now two beaded drops perspire from the sagging sky behind the window. And we taste the first wafts of concrete steam peeling off the pavements.

And now it is here.

Lone bullets of water smack the pavement with improbable abandon; the people look at them like they are a dance. They think welcome.

And the rhythm accelerates - now we are walking through war. ammunition pelts the ground around us,  cannons fire against the clouds from within and artillery streaks through the sky, ripping it into shreds and rolling it up again into loose-knit thundery balls. The sound splits the seams of the heat; the people jump, exhale, and catch one anothers eyes, calmly. A blast of cool air escapes before the humid skins of transparency holding in the air are drawn taut again, sealing us in.

Black feet on a slippy pavement. And now under cover, the silver sliding off the station roof onto the hot coal like a liquid glass curtain, the people sit and watch, and wait for the next crisis, the bigger one.

Please mind the gap.