Small Heat, this day, the asphalt's temperature sensor reads sixty-one degrees Celsius. That figure comes from a municipal heat-island report a decade old, taken at half past noon, the road surface a mix of asphalt concrete with bitumen content around five percent. Asphalt absorbs solar radiation thirty to forty percent more efficiently than ordinary ground, a property of its dark color and rough texture, with nothing to do with feeling. But it releases heat far more slowly than it takes it in. What the day pours into it doesn't drop to near air temperature until two or three in the morning. The asphalt remembers the day longer than people do.

The shadow of the utility pole is shortest this month. At noon it nearly presses flat against the pole itself, almost gone.

The week before that typhoon, the tin awning over the arcade let out a faint sound under the sun, like someone treading lightly across a tin roof far away. No one stopped to listen. Two men stood at the mouth of the alley, their shadows shrunk in close around their feet, neither one speaking first, both waiting for the other to move.

Great Heat approaches, the point in the year when solar radiation peaks across the island. A tin roof's surface can run twenty degrees hotter than the air, which is the actual, physical reason old shophouses built tin awnings over their fronts; not for looks, but to keep those twenty degrees off the people standing underneath. The orange-red paint on a signboard softens slightly at this temperature, the color reading more saturated. That isn't a filter. That's the material responding.

Start of Autumn arrives. The temperature hasn't dropped, but the sun's angle has already begun drifting south, less than half a degree a day, too little for the eye to register, though the length of a shadow tells on it. The two men at the alley's mouth now cast shadows longer than they did at Small Heat.

End of Heat, and the heat won't leave cleanly. It's like holding onto a piece of iron that hasn't quite cooled. The asphalt keeps releasing, at night, what it took in during the day, only earlier now, because the sun no longer hands it enough to make up the difference.

Down that alley, a sun-bleached signboard stays where it's always been, its red gone nearly orange, the corners curling slightly. No one has replaced it.

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