Early Saturday, Dateline Milna

By 10 p.m. we fled the Riva, I feel strangely agitated by travel,heat, a single glass of pivo, foreign sounds and movement.

Now, by 2:30 a.m., the drunken singing from the Riva, which had sounded suprisingly good from my house on the brizak, has been replaced by the wind and rain of a thunderstorm blowing over from Italy.

Our shutters groan at being shoved rudely back and forth by the wind. I rise and adjust our window to keep out the rain but still let in the cool air. The sky goes white. I count, "One thousand-one, One thousand-two, One
thousand-three, One thousand-four, One thousand-five, One thousand-six, One thousand-seven . . ."

I am looking down at our courtyard in the darkness. A flickering will-o-wisp brightly flees up our tiny street, passes without hesitation through our closed steel mesh gate, flickers round the corner of our storage shed, and vanishes into the stony field beyond.

The rain picks up and steadies itself, calming me.