The Summer That Melted Everything

by Tiffany McDaniel

Fear was a square that decade so it could fit into our homes better, into our neat little four-cornered lives.

An old man living alone is no keeper of elegance.

Paved roads were something other towns did.

My sudden awareness of the heat was a pop, the way the bubble joins the water in a boil.

Seeing her in those dresses made me think of lace and lavender and radio theater.

“You can tell a lot about a man by what he does with a snake.”

She had a drawl like raw vegetables. Hard. Rooted. Not yet ripe.

Land is my forever now, my thoroughly ended heaven. No sky will have me, no God either.

Knowing only the feeling of falling, the blood dripping like red feathers down my back.”

Isn’t that what sin is, after all? Life given too much flame?

I thought you were dumb. I didn’t know you were son-of-a-bitch dumb.”

“Even a devil’s heart isn’t just for beating.”

him. For seventy-one years I’ve been trying to find that feeling of being held by my brother.

out. What a housebound woman fears is not the knife in the kitchen drawer. It is the outside being better.

To have my brother’s tear slide down my face cut worse than the world’s sharpest knife.

I’ve not been happy with aging. My once supple limbs and previously bendable joints are now as stiff as layers of cardboard stapled together.

arthritis is a bending demon,

I think about my death. I know it is the long hallway of burning doors that awaits me. I know it is the real devil I go to eternity with.

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

Dresden was a girl too in love with her mother ever to see the monster of

It was an everything bad sound.

I hate you for leaving me no choice but to go forth into this heat-colored future and its long voyage I no longer want to hold.

Hoping that all those folks are just shards of broken glass and one day in the future, they’ll save someone by being just that.