The Storm

It's one of those days when the sun is hot lead and the air presses onto your skin like a damp flannel. There are no clouds, but the sky isn't even blue any more, pollution has hazed it to a dirty white. All around you, the few who are still here pretend they're not slowly cooking in this mountain-rimmed oven that is Grenoble, student city, deserted for the holidays. The wiser permanent residents have also fled to gentler climes, leaving you and these strangers to roast in your own sweat.

Sometimes there's a breath of wind, and even though it only sends the hot air into your face again, you think it's cooling you down, and that's what matters. You don't get used to this sort of heat: rather, you learn to think of other things, to add lemon juice to the tap water you keep bottled in the fridge, to sleep after lunch. Children splash in fountains, and you take your shoes off and paddle with them. You find the shops with air conditioning and there you spend far more time than shopping demands, and nobody needs an excuse for ice cream. And once you've finished, you have no money left and can't put off the walk home any longer, you take the more shaded route back, and cross the street to avoid the sun.

Sometimes, a miracle happens.

Of course, most of the time it's just the windspray from a fountain, or someone watering their plants a little too carelessly as you walk by underneath. But sometimes, that warm, heavy drop on your arm multiplies. Clouds that weren't there five minutes ago gather and grow, and a promising rumble raises hopes - people run for cover with newfound energy, and a prudent few take out umbrellas. But you and I, and those like us, we just stop and stand there, gazing up, hoping to be the first to see a flash -

It hits us, sudden as an awakening in which we remember why we're here, on our way home from the air conditioned shopping centre, where the whole town had turned out, united in the desire to escape the summer heat. The rain soaks into our clothes, weighing them down, and into our skin, reviving us, bringing us back to the surface of our dry fatigue and into a strange wonder - for on this day, at this time, the sun is opposite the clouds, and through the meteor shower of sunlit rain, the whole spectrum glows against the sombre sky.

Children dance, adults laugh, and we celebrate the fulfilment of everyone's secret wish - that the heavens would open and drench us all in a deluge of sweet relief.