Thunderstorm

The blue of the sky showing between the still clouds was smudged with transparent white.

The boy at the back of the office suspended for a moment the cord going round the eternal package.

‘I can only remember one other like this,’ he statistically remarked.

A cold silence. The sounds from the street seemed to be cut by a knife. Then there was a long, cosmically held breath, a kind of generalized dread. The entire universe had stopped dead. Moments, moments, moments… Silence blackened the darkness.

All of a sudden, live steel .....

How human the metallic peal of the trams! How happy the landscape of simple rain falling on the street resurrected from the chasm!

Oh Lisbon, my home!