The Summer That Melted Everything

by Tiffany McDaniel

THE HEAT CAME with the devil. It was the summer of 1984, and while the devil had been invited, the heat had not. It should’ve been expected, though. Heat is, after all, the devil’s name, and when’s the last time you left home without yours?

THE FINALE OF fear is first neared by small labors of bravery. These small labors will eventually lead to the last laboring of the great defeat of the fear altogether. That is the breathing text of hope anyways, that we branch an escape from fear’s trapping circle.

“What movie you boys wanna watch? Hmm? Something Wicked This Way Comes? How ’bout Mr. Mom? I just love that one.

I appreciate the direct nod to Ray Bradbury here. As I’ve been reading, the ‘evil comes to small town’ similarity of ‘Something Wicked’ kept coming to mind. Bradbury’s influence oozes out of these pages from his other Green Town stories as well. From young boys coming of age in summertime (not a far switch with the sweltering heat in McDaniels novel), small town politics, and right down to Bradbury’s poetic style of writing. It’s a great homage. But Tiffany McDaniel raises the bar. Her writing is beautifully lyrical and complex with an added razor sharp edge. She tackles some really tough and often uncomfortable subjects like a master. She’s a power house of a writer.

August was. And by the beginning of it, news of our heat wave stretched across the nation like one long sentence looking to never surrender to a period.

As we walked home, I knew from far away the trees would’ve looked nice, the grass would’ve looked green, and we would’ve looked like just a couple of boys walking home, armed with Midwest love and Bible Belt morals. But up close, the trees were scorched, the grass was dead, and the boys were on the verge of tears with the belts of those morals tightened around their necks, threatening to hang them if they dared step off the stool of masculinity.

“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.”

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. I am for my own teeth. I am for my own stomach. I alone eat myself to the dark.

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?

MADNESS. THE COMPASSING violin when in our head, the directionless chaos when out of it. Isn’t that what madness is, after all? Clarity to the beholder, insanity to the witnessing world. My God, what madness this world has witnessed. What beautiful, chaotic madness.