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 was a heat that didn’t just melt tangible things like ice, chocolate, Popsicles. It melted all the intangibles too. Fear, faith, anger, and those long-trusted templates of common sense. It melted lives as well, leaving futures to be slung with the dirt of the gravedigger’s shovel.

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

I walk through these fields of empty frozen dinner trays and beer bottles the way I used to walk through fields of tall grass and wildflowers.

imagined him with reptilian skin in a suit whose burning lapel set off fire alarms. His fingernails sharp as shark teeth and cannibals in ten different ways. Snakes on him like tar. Flies buzzing around him like an odd sense of humor. There would be hooves, horns, pitchforks. Maybe a goatee. This is what I thought he’d be. A spectacular fright. I was wrong.

A foolish mistake, it is, to expect the beast, because sometimes, sometimes, it is the flower’s turn to own the name.

ONCE HEARD someone refer to Breathed as the scar of the paradise we lost. So it was in many ways, a place with a perfect wound just below the surface.

If looks were to be believed, he still was just a boy. Something of my age, though from his solemn quietude, I knew he was old in the soul.

Elohim’s pamphlets were notebook papers full of his vegetarian thoughts. Things like, animals live a horizontal life while we live a vertical one. According to him, this means when we eat something horizontal, we risk falling down:

You looked at her and knew when she went to bed, she’d rather be blowing out a candle than flicking a light switch. Modernity was lost on her and died in cobwebs in the background to her old-fashioned grace.

Then he said how her hair reminded him of the color of leaves in the autumn. “Red and burnt by an October oven.”

MY KNEES KNOW I’m a praying man. The broken dishes, the empty beer bottles, the hole in the wall the size of my fist, all know I am an unanswered man. Why is no one answering me?

I waited for all the familiar voices to say just this, but I am the unanswered man. I am the inside of silence.

Something about his eyes made me think of Russia. Perhaps because they were so large, the largest country in the world of his face. Then again, knowing what I know now, maybe it was because his eyes were so like matryoshka dolls, hiding the real him within boxes of lacquered mystery.

But really he was as wild and as twisting as the honeysuckle vines. Bending and exploding in uneven wonders. Moveable and crooked, crossing in awesome curves and beautiful bends.

“Has your father ever thrown you up on his shoulders? Carried you around?” “Sure, when I was a cricket.” “Then you’ve felt what it feels like to fly. It is being carried by something that raises you up while at the same time promises to never drop you.” “Well, if that’s the case, then when you flew I guess you knew what it’s like to be carried by a father.”

If, however, I were to land on one of my sins, I promised myself I would go on with the punishment and the guilt and let the final fangs in to do all their damage. I would stay the shape that best fits the coffin and accept the terrifying permanence of my crimes.

On the page a painting of gray, wild waves. I have since torn that page out of the book and set the painting to frame by the side of my bed. I suppose it is a painting of my father from that night he raged like waves in a storm.

“Sometimes this world is like red fences in the snow. There ain’t no hiding who we really are.”

“After I fell, I kept repeating to myself, God will forgive me. God will forgive me. Centuries of repeating this, I started to shorten it to He’ll forgive me. Then finally to one word, He’ll. He’ll. “Somewhere along the way, I lost that apostrophe and now it’s only Hell. But hidden in that one word is God will forgive me. God will forgive me. That is what is behind my door, you understand. A world of no apostrophes and, therefore, no hope.”

Why you care so much about this girl anyways?” “Even a devil’s heart isn’t just for beating.”

And as I tumbled down this staircase, I felt every step, all seven million of them. The steps are too there not to be felt, they are too edged not to sober you to the errors of your fray. The pain is smart enough to poet out a space, where bruises are verse and rhymes are moans over and over again.

You reach back and hold tight to it because to do so is deciding to believe that by holding on, you can survive being let go of.

Hope is just a beautiful instance in the myth of the second chance.

“The hand’s first existence was that of warmth. Its second was that of dignifying my hope by holding my hand tighter than all the others. But above all else, the hand existed as that of pure love. I could near all the hearts of this world and never come near being loved like that again. That was how I knew the seven millionth hand was God’s.

He suddenly looked as if he regretted ever lifting a dumbbell in the first place. They had not prepared him for what to do for a fallen wife and child. They had not prepared him to keep that from happening, and at this he frowned into his abs.

No one ever said you’ve got to prepare to be hated. You’ve got to prepare for the yelling and the anger. You have got to prepare how to survive being the guilty one, even in innocence.

“The thing about trying on your father’s suit is that if you wear it outside the closet, you are no longer merely trying it on. You are wearing it. Some may think this is you trying to replace your father.” “Did ya step outside the closet, Sal?” He nodded. “But only because there were no mirrors in the closet and I just wanted to see how I looked. That was all.

Sometimes the only thing left to do is to flee the life and hope that after we’ve fled we’re spared the judgment of dying wrong.

She never removed these ribbons, so over time her hair wrapped around them. The way they wove, they could sometimes look like slithering in an undergrowth. It was as if she were the infected Eden, the snake still turning through Eve.

Those appetite-suppressing chocolates that did not work. That did not keep the lonely woman from eating the company of food. Bandages on a plate for all the wounds inside.

and once it was said, it became like most gossip, drama that ruins.

“You do not count your days well spent. How could you? Not with all the anger you have. Why have you built infinity for your husband’s mistresses upon your head?”

“People always ask, why does God allow suffering? Why does He allow a child to be beaten? A woman to cry? A holocaust to happen? A good dog to die painfully? Simple truth is, He wants to see for Himself what we’ll do. He’s stood up the candle, put the devil at the wick, and now He wants to see if we blow it out or let it burn down. God is suffering’s biggest spectator.

hated the way she looked at me as she lay there. Out of all the world, she looked at me, and I wanted to say, Look at the trees. It’s the last time. Look at the sky. It’s the last time. Look there, at that ant crawl the grass blade. It will be the last time you see it. That you see any of this.

“No. You’re just a boy. A boy holds a gun but cannot fire it, even when he knows it is the right thing to do. A god would never hold the gun in the first place. So you’re a man-in-training. And on the day you are asked to hold the gun once more, you will have to decide whether to stay the child . . . or finally become the man.”

Granny was my first loss, my first emptying. She was the something that matters for eternity.

He had layers of sweat. One from the heat. One from the fight. One from his walk. One from the girl he did not want. The sweat making a circle on his shirt at the small of his back like some sort of ripe fruit.

I would build it cradles, yes, but wouldn’t actually cradle it myself. How could I with my sleeves drenched in blood? The snake has had its victories over me. And in its victories I am no longer sweet nor gentle. The very things a good father must be. It’s impossible to make a family when your mind spins mad with the old monsters. Isn’t it?

“It would do none of us any good, runnin’ an evil off like we’re too weak and too scared to take care of our own problems. As if we zero in bravery and sword. We can’t forget, we are the lords of our own ’round here, and we alone hiss back the serpent.”

His teeth marks were gone from my skin, but they were fossilized underneath. Branded upon my bone. I have no doubt they would show up on X-ray. I am his walking dental record.

The silence that followed was like practicing for death. That lonely silence that describes the dark so well.

“My momma, God rest her soul, used to say a black boy is only good till he reaches thirteen. After that, he’s man bound, and a black man’s no good for nothin’, especially since they passed all them laws on workin’ ’em.

I thought, hell, this girl really wants to marry me. Why not give it a try? Maybe her love would be enough to paradise the hell. But then I realized, I couldn’t use her like that. Like a shield in the fray. She deserved to marry a man who loved her for all the things she was and not for all the armor she could be.

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.

Blood is hard to wash out, I knew she was thinking, her eyes rolling like washing machines already starting the job.

Melancholy is the woman with ribs like nails and lies like hammers. My mother’s lie was that our house could be enough. That its countries could keep her from feeling like she was missing out. What a housebound woman fears is not the knife in the kitchen drawer. It is the outside being better.

SOMETIMES I THINK I see your shoulder. Then I realize it’s just a jar of honey. I scream out your name and am certain I see your mole, but it’s only the last grape on the vine. I grab hold of your neck, but it’s no more than a piece of rope. I reach toward your rib, but it’s simply a grain of rice. I hold your hand, sorrowed to find it is my own.

“I had been so certain of his guilt. If I could be so certain and yet so wrong, how many times had I been wrong before? I started to wonder. I looked back on my cases and saw cracks, not victories. I was no hero.

Those followers of Elohim all had their own Helens, their own Andrea Dorias, their own devils they needed to blame. It was a support group for the wronged. Like the brother of the twin killed in a gas station being robbed by a black man in a black ski mask. There was the father whose daughter had been made a vegetable by the drunk driver who was drunk, black, and very, very drunk. And a wife who’d been raped while coming out of a bar in Toledo. Three rapists, all one color. Black. Black. Black. That color brought Elohim and his group together. It was the color of their devil, and they needed their devil to have a color so they could find him again.