#uncoffeed...

Despite coming off the ocean, the wind was hot. It was baked like challa and it twisted through the oven of concrete and tilted brick buildings. It bounced over the wretched pile of rocks and earth that comprised the town square after the earthquake. Nobody had the fortitude to clean it up. Squalid children played in the mudholes (there had been no rain for weeks, and thus only the very worst of possibilities as to whence the mud had come.) Dogs as dirty and thin as the children wafted in and out and over the rockpile, like physical manifestations of the devil-breathed wind. America stepped carefully between the loose bricks of the street, as though she would be able to preserve the sheen on her freshly-polished shoes.  In defiance of the heat she was fully dressed - splendidly so - in pitch black: from her patent leather shoes to her stockings to her tight-fitting dress and the hat with a blackbird sleeping on it. She did not wipe the beads of sweat that gathered under the ha...