This is a translation. I primarily write fiction in Dutch. You can read the original here.

Shuttle

Oven of stone. Street after street, not a single tree or shrub in sight. Stone and asphalt everywhere, dead weeds between the paving. Rows and rows of bricks that, swept up by the fierce sun, assault you from all sides with a radiating heat. My head is about to explode.

Susan is flushed red. Sweat streams down her neck, but she walks with more ease than I do. Calmer. More determined, too. The last bottle of rosé held carelessly in her hand. She swings it around precariously. "Come on, sad sack, just a little further."

I can't take it anymore. I simply can't see straight. Across the street, a man is walking by with a stroller. He has the face of a crocodile. That's impossible, but it's really true. A normal body and neck, hair on his head, but where his face should be bulges a large green snout with irregular yellow teeth. Without so much as a glance, he strolls by, nonchalantly pushing the stroller ahead of him.

"Susan, I need to sit down for a minute."

She squats down next to me. Carefully, making sure to touch as little of the paving stones as possible. She hands me the bottle. We sit like that for a while.

Then she asks, "What are you, a badminton shuttle or a squash ball?"

"What?"

"Are you a badminton shuttle or a squash ball?"

"What do you mean?"

"Shuttles always float gracefully through the air. It doesn't matter how hard you hit them with your racket, a shuttle just slows down and floats over the net with an elegant arc. If you give a squash ball a good whack, it just bounces around even harder."

Images from the past. Back when I was young and still played sports.

"Sounds like you define life as a series of blows to the head." I hand the bottle back to her. Rosé only makes me sweat more anyway.

Another man with a stroller walks by. From the opposite direction, but it isn't the same guy. He too has a face like a crocodile.

"Susan," I say, "what kind of face does that man have?"

"Crocodile," she says. "You see a lot of them around here." She points around and, sure enough, more crocodile-men with strollers suddenly emerge from various directions. How did I not notice them before?

"They are tropical animals, they handle the heat well," she explains. "There are little ones in those strollers. When a crocodile reproduces, you usually just get another crocodile." When she puts it like that, it sounds perfectly logical.

Another one approaches us, now on our side of the street. He is going to pass right by us. There's something wrong about him. Aside from the face, I mean. It's the way they move. Because of the stroller, I can't quite see it. The closer he gets, the more stifling it becomes.

Susan places her hand on my shoulder. "Careful," she says. "They're friendly, but don't provoke them."

There's something about that walk behind the stroller. It isn't right. The air shimmers, as if you can see his bad breath. The rhythmic pounding of my heart amplifies. It tries to beat through the pressurized air that fills my head. It's his feet.

Susan presses harder on my shoulder, but my arm reaches out as if on its own and my hand starts to point. Those feet. They aren't touching the ground. They are cycling through the air, as if he's pedaling instead of walking.

"Susan, look! Behind the stroller. He's floating!"