The pavement is soft enough to leave a footprint by noon, and the whole city moves like it's underwater, slow and gasping, every collar dark with sweat. She stands at the crossing and lets the heat come at her the way it comes at everyone else — off the asphalt, off the parked cars, off the flat white sky — and waits, for a second, to feel it.
It doesn't arrive. Not really. It sits on her skin like a coat she forgot to take off, and underneath, something keeps its temperature exactly where it's been since March, cold enough to ache, cold enough that her own pulse feels like someone tapping on ice from the wrong side.
A stranger at the crossing fans himself with a folded map and says the heatwave's going to kill someone by Friday, and she nods, because that's what you do, and thinks: it would have to find me first.
At home she runs her wrists under water gone lukewarm from the pipes baking in the wall, waiting for the relief everyone else keeps talking about. Her reflection in the dark window looks flushed, sunburnt at the cheeks, entirely convincing.
Only she knows what's underneath. Some hearts freeze in an instant — in a doorway, on a single sentence — and no July has ever found the thermostat for that.
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