A PIGEON HUNCHED up dark and round in the green of a locust tree, under dim skies. The air had lost its coolness. The clouds were irregular but gray all the way through. Brunchers sat right up beside the open windows of restaurants, with the brunch music carrying past them over fully empty outdoor tables. A damp flickering drizzle came on for a while. A cyclist in a backpack did a slow wheelie up the avenue. The line outside the pastry shop was merely ridiculous, not impossible the way it had been in the sunshine the day before. The rain finally became a shower, passing on by the end of lunch. Old silt from the floods, made wet again, crunched underfoot with a sound like skulls crunching in a movie. Airplanes grumbled under the cloud cover. An unleashed dog looked curiously at the human who’d let her loose, who told her he had no plans to follow her into the wet grass. It was too humid to cool down the indoors without air conditioning; the windows, open for days, had to be shut again.
