The Summer That Melted Everything

by Tiffany McDaniel

She wasn’t thought to be the prettiest of girls. Her hazel eyes were a little too aslant. Her wrists were a little too bony. Her freckles were a little too much.

It’s a waste of time to live better when you’ve got no one to care for and no one to care for you.

“And not one of you is to use the N-word that horrid woman said tonight to Sal. I swear I wish people were forced to make a list of names and recite them every time they use that word. “A list of the names of every black man, woman, and child hated, beaten, killed for the color of their flesh. It should be law—by God, it should be law—that if you say that word, you must then say their names.

I am not the ruler of hell. I am merely its first and most famous sufferer turned custodian with the key to the gate in my back pocket.”

“As I dangled there in the sky from His hand, I knew He didn’t want to let me go. But I also knew that if He did not let go, He would be ruined by holding onto me. So in that choice, I let go of Him. I had to, for His sake. I had to fall as the Devil, so He could stay the God.”

That his American chance would go to the grave in the dirt around him.

“You know, Fielding, the thing about breaking something that no one much thinks about is that more shadows are created. The bowl when intact was one shadow. One single shadow. Now each piece will have a shadow of its own. My God, so many shadows have been made. Small little slivers of darkness that seem at once to be larger than the bowl ever was. That’s the problem of broken things. The light dies in small ways, and the shadows—well, they always win big in the end.”

And isn’t that the biggest tragedy of all? When a boy has to be the devil in order to be significant?

I deserve the vinegar, not the violets. It was why I left that queen-sized heaven and that man who made love like a Langston Hughes poem.

I could open the locker and find the old Fielding, a summer younger. I could open it to Grand. There he’d be, squeezed inside, and I could just pull him out. Dresden too. Just keep pulling out all the things lost.

Breathed was a paradise lost to us.