The Summer That Melted Everything

by Tiffany McDaniel

Sometimes the things we believe we hear are really just our own shifting needs.

Everything seems so piled up nowadays. Hills all around me, from the soft mounds of laundry to the dishes in the sink.

“That’s odd.” I set the bag of groceries down to open the wrapper. The chocolate oozed and dropped. I said the first thing that came to mind: “It died.” “Dead, you say?” The boy looked down at the chocolate splattered on the ground. “Well, it’s melted. Ain’t that death for chocolate? It ain’t even that hot.”

There is an aboveground pool. The last person who swam in it came down with some sort of parasite. I thought at first they said he came down with paradise, so I took a swim myself, diving down beneath the empty beer cans floating on the surface but finding nothing but a dead snake in the bottom.

“Stella. If you wanna see her, you’ll have to go to her. Porch is the farthest she’ll come.” “Why?” “She’s afraid of the rain.” “It’s not raining.” “Naw, but it might start.”

For such a divine event, it’s a rather ordinary agony. To have hope raised, only to realize there is no hope to be had. Hope is just a beautiful instance in the myth of the second chance.

Mom had been right. The heat was making people behave on their most terrible side. Maybe it even gave them the confidence to act foolishly, rashly, without real reason. Hands in such heat bloom to fists. Fists are the flora of the mad season.

Maybe I am lonely. Maybe I do hold onto the pillow at night, maybe I have twisted a bread tie around my ring finger just to see what it feels like to have a meaning there.

It was Carl Jung who said shame is a soul-eating emotion. It doesn’t eat you in one big gulp. It takes its time. Seventy-one years, it is still taking its time.

Being the devil made him important. Made him visible. And isn’t that the biggest tragedy of all? When a boy has to be the devil in order to be significant?

Losing Grand turned me into the passed-by. Blue skies, they pass me by. Good days, they pass me by. Talk and joy pass me by. The reasons people laugh, the reasons they smile, pass me by. Whoosh, whoosh, passing me by.

There are winter dreams to be had when summer makes too good of its time.

Call it a miracle, or just call it weather.

“We live each day with thoughts we think are certain to the core, Fielding. But what if we are sincerely wrong? Take a look at this cross. We are told it’s a cross, so surely it must be a cross. But what if it isn’t? What if we’re wrong? What if this whole time we’ve just been hanging a lowercased t on our walls?”