Fiction, continued
this is the beginning to the short story i excerpted here. maybe eventually the whole thing will be posted in confusing non-sequitors. wouldn’t that be fun?
“Heat warps memory and reality as it does photographs, and vinyl records, and credit cards. It has an unforgiving presence, seeping into all the places you hold sacred – into your bath, between your fingers and toes, your churning and dying air conditioners. It is the heat, this summer, that is the constant to my memories. And it is on the heat that I now blame any transgressions of character or departures from sane behavior.
Houston’s heat is singular and infamous. The city has thrown an invisible plastic sheath around itself, blocking out the breeze and the relief. It has turned inwards and begun to fester, reveling in it’s own accomplishments: 95 degrees in the shade, the hottest two-month stretch in recorded history. In July, the days don’t drop below 98 for two weeks. We are a national state of emergency. Old people without loved ones or pets are dying unnoticed, like the June bugs that collapse and wither on the very leaves they chew. There are air conditioning shelters in the local elementary schools, and I sneak away to the one near my house to watch the homeless people file in. They look like oil paintings, shiny and ridged with grime and sweat. Mothers leaving their children there all day. These children are baffled by their abandonment, and the parents seem jealous to leave them in such cool decadence.
The heat does not seem to affect those of us without the clutches and trappings of the real world – for us, it means our mothers and fathers will grudgingly turn on the lawn sprinkler each afternoon for us to play in. We alternately run towards and dash away from its mechanical attacks, chig-chig-chig, as it arcs its cooling path over the piles of sweaty little bodies. Parents watch from the window, clucking at our carefree attitude towards yet another burden of circumstance that they must face.
Our house doesn’t have air conditioning. We have financial worries, my mother tells us, and so we must make do, which is nothing new, since we make do in winter as well. My mother puts our sheets in the deep freezer every night for twenty minutes before bed time, which leaves me rashy and rubbed raw in the morning. We are allowed to eat as much ice as we want, and we are supposed to mark down our eight glasses of water a day on the fridge door. I am fourteen and have no interest in water. My mother also allows us, my sister Addy and I, to remain in various states of undress since we are all girls in the house, and we often lounge around eating popsicles in old mens’ undershirts that are dingy and grey from so many bleaching runs in the washing machine. They are irreversibly stained, at the end of the summer, with the drippings of our lazy afternoons – orange, pink sherbert, and grape are our favorites.”

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