If the Summer Heat Doesn’t Kill Me….

“woman wearing red sun hat” by Fabio Neo Amato on Unsplash

The brutal August heat of Nagoya feels like it is tearing the flesh from my body as the sweat rolls down my face and evaporates as quickly as the Japanese phrases I thought I’d put to memory moments ago.

A blue and white city bus rumbles up to the curb. A stream of orange Kanji and Hiragana race across the LCD reader on the front of the bus. I wait for the English then climb aboard. I take a seat by the window wondering if I’ll be sitting alone today.

Soon the bus is filled with the tired faces of early rising salary men dressed in dark blue and black business suits. They chat listlessly or read the newspaper in the aisle and seats around me. A square-faced man sits next to me so close I can smell his hairspray and the lingering cigarette smoke.

Looking out the window I see an old woman standing on the curb at the number seven stall. She is hunchbacked and her torso is nearly parallel with the sidewalk. In her left hand, she holds an unfurled white umbrella above her head that casts a tiny shadow along her body. For a second, as the bus pulls away, I catch her eyes; two brown rocks sweltering in the heat. In her eyes, all I see are questions, something like, “Can I really live through another summer?”

If the Summer Heat Doesn’t Kill Me…. was originally published in CROSSIN(G)ENRES on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.