Before the drought, we fed on nice things. Tilapia, soya, crackling honey-algae, bok choy grown fat on the moisture of harvested clouds. Tapioca from the back-alley gardens, mixed into pearls. We flitted from street corner to street corner, reconfiguring our wallets to suit each other's tastes. Once, you discovered a desalination plant where they made every flavour of glacier on the planet. When we kissed, meltwater trickled from our chins. All the while the air between us broiled like a blister with a heat only our mala-flavoured cassava chips could match, a shimmer like the bottom of ice cubes in a thick plastic mug of sparkling sugarcane juice. What else could I say? We enjoyed plenty. We loved sweetly. We danced under covered walkways. The adaptive solar panels sang for us, for when it rained, it poured. You have to understand that there is no constitutive after to this present. No 'after', to a season defined by lack.

Storms still and waters recede--but the sun, maddeningly, persists.