Sunburnt Faces

She was awakened by the yowling of cats in heat and in the dim weightiness of awakening consciousness she carried on listening, but it gradually faded, threads of a dream dwindling into the vast silence of the night. Yet she sat up in bed and cocked an ear, feeling for echoes and refractions. Nothing. Some of the lightening darkness filtered into the room through the almost completely closed slats of the shutter on the only window; darkness mingling with deeper darkness. And apart from that – a hush. You could drown in the density of the silence. It had been one of those nights in which summer breaks through the thickness of winter. Only two weeks ago they had celebrated the New Year of Trees at school, and the sword of the first hamsin heat wave had already struck Netivot. It had taken nature by surprise, albeit with exemplary precision as it did every year in March. And the sound of the insects coming from the wild vegetation of early summer, from the nauseating blossom of the acacia and oleander, from the provocative eruption of the honeysuckle – the bees with their menacing buzzing and the cicadas and their sawing – and the bothersome rustling, the constantly stimulated air still waited, cheated by the feeble movement of the seasons’ clock. It had not rained and the dissonance of the clouds as they collided in their passing, and the whipping of the water, from the hesitant, shy drops...