Autumn
14 September 2004. Inspired by .
For two hours last night/this morning, there was a huge storm. It was the type where the entire city breathes out at once after each blinding flicker, and the window frames throb with the bass of the thunder.
Un, dos, tres, cu...
One kilometre away, we all counted silently together. And closing.
Soon you couldn't count – the flashes were so regular that they overlapped, too fast for the thunder to catch up, the flickering so strong that it felt a surge away from lighting up the sky for good.
A few hours earlier, this morning/last night, when the air was heavy but the streets were wet only from their daily hosing, I walked quickly through Plaça Reial.
I walked this way:
Which was daft because the bar I was meeting friends in was in the other corner, and so I should have gone this way:
But instead I walked around like this:
* - points at which I was offered "coke, hashish"
Less than five minutes later, the bar was humming with talk. "Did you hear?" breathed every corner simultaneously. "A tree just fell in the Plaça and hit a tourist. They took her to hospital. Crushed her cheap steel chair. It's still sitting there, twisted in half like nobody's business."
It was true. Less than a minute after I'd passed it, one of the square's distinctive 20m high palm trees (x) had yawned, stretched and come crashing to the ground. 
On top of someone.
We left the bar half an hour later and the tree was still lying there, without a hint of embarrassment, waiting for the police to take it away in a van. Around its forlorn root there was some police tape, discarded party streamers after the event. The split between prone log and fixed base was at head height, with teenage blonde spikes pointing to the stars. People came over to run their fingers through it, feeling the tingle of tomorrow's news. "If she dies," they were thinking (though she didn't), "we were there."
Over by the 18m-long Exhibit A, tiny green fragments were scattered everywhere. Broken bottles? A glass table? But it squelched not crunched – palm fruit smashed on impact.
Police tape was wrapped around the area, nothing on the crime scene above 20cm off the floor except one shiny object in the centre: a cheap steel baby deer, one shoulder touching the ground, trying desperately to stand up.