There was something strange about it, he thought, as he meandered down the sideward, running the word over his tongue a few times. It seemed so poorly suited to what it represented. Heat could be cruel or kind; heat could be welcomed; heat could be hated. But ‘hot’? It was the sort of word that let slip no clues of the complexity of what it described, and that a meaning so broad, so diverse in nature, could be squeezed into just three letters, one syllable, seemed, to Set, almost grotesque. Hot.
Back then, it was . That suited his current mood far better.
It was hot now, but not irritatingly so. It was just the sort of weather where, if you were to stand out of the shade for too long, you would begin to feel the gentle prickling of the midday sun, not entirely unpleasant, against your cheek. But, still, it was just hot enough to bring red sands and red thoughts to the front of a certain chaotic mind.
‘Still,’ Set mumbled to himself, ‘"hot" really isn’t much of a description.’
Around him, trees, green as the delta, were blooming over the heads of the sudden noisy inundation of people and cars, brought outside by the weather. Above, there was barely a fleck of cloud in the river-blue sky.
Set sighed. In his hands, he was turning over and over the 25 cent vending machine bouncy ball he had bought, on a whim, earlier that morning. Something was wrong. The day needed something more to make it complete, although what exactly it needed he did not yet know. A car crash, perhaps. A thunder storm. Something. Anything. After all, there was nothing like little bit of chaos to brighten an already sunny day.
Still, hot didn’t seem the right way to describe it. Something so short could never describe something so complex.
Then again, his name was three letters. One syllable.
He tossed the ball experimentally in the air a few times, picturing it were be a boulder about to smash through the buildings before him. Bricks in his mind began to crumble. In his head, windows shattered.
The ball shot, a pink blur, through the thick air, ricocheted off the building with a resounding pwang and disappeared underneath the torrent of moving cars. On the wall, it had left barely more than a scratch.