Summer Night
They have a name for this time of the season. A little further south, well OK a lot further south, where I grew up as a pup, they call it summer. Summer down there was a respite from the cold but you wouldn't call it hot, there were still clouds in the sky, it still rained occasionally, very occasionally, but it was summer. It was a chance to air out our shorts and t-shirts, to let our jackets and jumpers and thick woolen socks rest in our closets for a little while. It makes me remember picnics, laughter, running through green fields.
Something as artificial as summer doesn't last the few seconds it takes to pass from your mouth to their ears up here. Here it's the hot, or the dry, and the wet. The dry, who's edge we were at, was a time without clouds, where the earth baked and cracked and turned as hard as concrete underpaw. The wet wasn't cold either though, the heat was there like, inescapable, but it was, as the name may have made you guess, wet. It rained like nothing I had ever experienced before, like all the water of the months it would rain down south were poured on the earth in a single night.
In between the two, sometimes for a week sometimes for a month, as variable as the thickness of a shoddily made blade, was something called the buildup. No one could pin point when it started, some people could sense it earlier than others, usually the reptilian natives or the ones who had lived here so long they trimmed their fur right down to the skin. Eventually though everyone could feel it, a pressure at the back of your mind, the feeling that rain was coming, the scent that wasn't there but you could swear you smelt it, the smell of rain.
Eventually you would see it. Mighty dark clouds rolling on the horizon during the day. Some days they were closer than others and you could feel your body aching for the little drops of water pelting from the sky. You'd look up at the dark clouds and see them flash with their lightning, hear them rumble, feel them rumble! But the dark clouds would just roll and churn and flow over the sky like the contents of some ungodly butter churn spilling it's load over the sky.
People go a little mad in the build up. Friends get tense with each other over little things, imagined grudges. A town where you'd only hear a car horn to get a kangaroo off the road would suddenly be a place where people didn't cross the road fast enough. Children got into tussles, drunks got into fights, the police turned a blind eye.
It was also, if you listened carefully at night or talked to the right people, a time of passionate, uninhibited sex. Married couples who loved each other but rarely had sex, rarely had time for sex, made the time, set is aside, and their libidos gave way and crashed over their thrashing bodies like a dam exploding and flooding a village. It was also a time when lust led people to make advances they otherwise wouldn't.
At the window I see the gleam of his eyes first, then a glimpse of the moonlight off his teeth and then he climbs in through the open window. His singlet hits the floor, he fumbles with his belt then his jeans and belt jingle as he steps out of them. No underwear lies on the side of the bed as he climbs in to join me, he knew he didn't need it tonight. His lips brush my neck and I feel it, I hear it, I have never wanted it so much.
The rain falls on the ground outside.