Hot Enough for June

You lift your head from the damp pillow; after one of those hot nights where you're not sure if you slept or not, when you're so tired you can hear the coffee and smell the tinny radio music playing in the café across the road. Your window is wide open to the stimuli but your brain is offset by one or two degrees. It is June in Sevilla. You are quite sure you and the café owner are the only people to wake up before the church bells. They ring at 9 - for the mass that only black-weed widows go to. The bells are in your bones. Still, things are improving, vibration is noise – or noise is vibration – or something, Anyway, you are not tasting the bright, white sunlight streaming through the window.

No.

You are tasting last night's chupitos. The tang of second hand cigarillos and even porros smoked right there in the blossom-filled square in front of a bored Guardia Civil, who had loosened enough buttons on his shirt to look like a porn star. One from as predictable a scene as ever appeared in a movie shot on flickering super 8mm film, half a lifetime ago. You are hunched forward, sitting naked on the edge of the narrow bed. Last night's clothes seem to glow, still hot - though they are strewn on the floor and should at least be cooler, if clammy.

The water trickles from the shower. June is early for cuts in the supply, but it is hot this year. Hotter than last year. Hotter than it's been since 1995. You listen for the hiss as the droplets hit your skin, but it doesn't come: instead you smell lemons. You step out of the shower cubicle, watch the puddles evaporate and let yourself dry by standing naked in front of the mirror. Gravity is cruel, and truth is not beauty. You pick last night's clothes up. The smell is palpable, it would be this morning.

In the wardrobe are a cheesecloth blouse the last occupant of the room left behind, as well as your own, last clean pair of linen trousers. You put both on.

It's time to listen to the coffee and smell the music in the café.

Footnote: a Porro is a joint. Chupitos are shots.