The Divine Translation by Estelle Coppolani

I was visited again yesterday. The end of work had given me back to the world. I sat on a bench shaded by a large red palm tree, watching the nightfall. The ravine on the edge of which I sat held a fragrant rut, soaked with dead leaves and spoiled fruit. This natural repository had mixed the stench of several fallen lychee decomposed down to their oily entrails with the scents of macerated herbs. The hour came when the fading daylight shot its gilded rays on the surrounding pediments and sometimes also on a piece of exposed sheet metal or on a strip of cornice. I knew that for the next hour or two my skin would take on that sandy tint, while a small tribe of mosquitos drank themselves sick on blood like sour milk enclosed within my own veins

[… read the rest in the Oxonian Review]