Come out here, she said. She was standing out on the balcony. I stood holding my glass to my chest, conscious that I had been avoiding her gaze for some minutes now. She had perhaps noticed and resolved to have words. The rest of the dinner party continued behind us, early into the red wine. It seemed to me there should be more alcohol in my system before I had to speak to her.


We hadn't seen each other since that day she had left for her home country almost three months before. At the airport gate, the usual declarations, self-aware and held up, even then, to the films we copied in our ardour. In subsequent conversations I had found myself, shall we say, something like repulsed by her naked emotion. In text she was that way; overeager, pressing. I had withdrawn. She pushed back, then lashed out. Then a spattering of texts and incidental photographs that were obviously sent out in a kind of bruised friendship. It is not any easier to deal with how this too followed an old channel, one neither of us had carved out.


At any rate I went out onto the balcony and looked at the bland tree across the street, and the apartment block soaking in the golden light. It was horrible to look at such things, but the alternative was facing her. She wasn't speaking; I snuck a look. She sipped her wine. The muscles in her neck were pulled tight into long ropes. I thought of an animal; a neck covered in apricot-coloured fur. She seemed to be leaking into the light the aura of her pain. How exhausting, but how understandable. Nothing for it; I looked into my glass, and saw at the periphery the fluttering of her dress in the breeze. She smelled animal, too, in proximity, behind the wine and the scent of the Paulista air. I made no judgement of whether I liked this smell. Before I had. But there was no before, not really.


"Lovely to see you," she said.

"And you," I said.

"Look at that old man walking there," she said, "he has such an interesting gait. I wonder if he's going home."

He walked sloping and rolling, like Chaplin, both faster and slower than the others in the street. I made the appropriate noises.

"What are you thinking?" she asked, at length.

I had nothing to say. I had been thinking of the cars going past, nothing more. Then the weather.

"That cloud," I said, pointing. A dark yellow cloud had appeared between the buildings.

"Looks like a storm," she said.

"Mmm, strange."

"It doesn't feel like a storm," she said.

The cloud was moving strangely fast. A wind picked up.

"Can you smell that?" she said, "it smells like — burnt electrics." She touched her hair bun, and seemed to remember her wine.

"It's not normal," I said.


The cloud engulfed the part of the city we were in. Soon enough it began to rain. She held out her hand.

"It's white," she said. It was so. Soon my hair was dripping with it. I shook my head. A near lake of white stretched below us, stalling the traffic. Still we could not go in. "Should we be concerned?"

"No, I don't think so," I said, "it's pollution, I think. This city's a piece of shit."

"I don't think it is," she said. She was covering her wine glass with a hand; the raindrops ran over the blue veins. I was struck by the banal fragility of things, generally. That is the terrible lie of the films we had copied. She knew that too, I think. That they last — all the ways they last, and we do not. There was a noise below. Someone had fallen. Another gripped him by the shoulders. The sound was high and wrenching. There was a strong, wild smell now. She and I stood watching the second wave of the storm as it broke, droplets spattering, dense as white oil.

Then, just as suddenly, the rain ceased, and the water left behind began to steam in the heat. It was an unexpected heat for this time of the day. The people who had fallen did not get up, and no one tended to them now. A car stood, red door hanging open. It had been abandoned in the white lake. There was a sound of alarm that I remembered hearing in films set in wartime. I shivered in my wet clothes. She released her wine from her palm and took a long drink, draining it. She did not seem to feel a thing. A creature of the fields, I thought, standing dumb. Except with me. With me she switched to another kind of animal altogether. An animal that would always bring home in its jaws something dead.


"Hey, the news — " one of the others called, "come and see this. Shit!"

The others were crowded around a laptop and holding up their phones. The news had come in; this new disaster, the reason for the rain. They called it out to us. They called us, with urgency. We lingered.

"I don't mind," she was saying, "I've never minded.The way we find beauty is. It's just like this." She held up her hand with the white droplets still on it. Her chest was rising and falling. She bent her head, met my gaze and licked her hand, turning it to get at every drop with her tongue.

"Just this," I heard myself say.

Helen McClory is the author of the Saltire award-winning collection of stories, ON THE EDGES OF VISION. She lives in Edinburgh.

Read her postcard.

Detail of photo on main page courtesy of C. Miper.





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