The Summer that Melted Everything

by Tiffany McDaniel

Later I’d hear he rolled his wheelchair off a train platform while wearing his old lavender and dark purple track uniform from Breathed High. 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.

“Ain’t you too old for this shit?” His hand dropped from his holster. “What’s that you got all over your beard? That red stuff?” “Barbecue sauce.”

“Did you know that before you came along, Sal, our four-person family was too small to own our name?” Dad held up the piece of paper he’d written our name on so he could illustrate his point. “I had the B, Mother there had the L, Grand had the I, and Fielding had the S. But this second S here has been waiting to be claimed this entire time. You, Sal, you are the last S in our name. You are the wholeness of our family.”

“What do you think you’re doing?” I found myself not stopping him. “I’m tyin’ them. So they won’t trip you anymore.” It was the kindest thing anyone had done for me in years. It was so kind, I had to sit down.

was Scranton who had made Fedelia so angry. He’d been her husband before running away with a blonde in fishnets. Through their marriage, Scranton was the sound of a motel bedspring squeaking.

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.

push. That was the idea laying pipes through town. Elohim did as he told the sheriff he would, which was to clear Sal’s name. Still, the thought was too hard to abandon for some, and once it was said, it became like most gossip, drama that

Over and over again, she jerked, and in the sharpness each jerk was the corner of so many things I just kept running into.

By letting her suffer, you risk being God.

“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.

“Hey, old girl.” I scratched her neck, and her tail wagged as best as it could. Only a dog could show such love in such pain.

There was something about her eyes that made me see her death as final. There was no place after, her tears said. This was it. Dying animals have that effect. I think because you never see them in church preparing for an afterlife. You never see them wearing crosses around their necks, or lighting candles in Mass. It all seems so final with them. Their dying is not moving on, it’s going out.

“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.”

warmth of the light. “I remember one Halloween my dad dressed up like an old bum.” He softly smiled. “He looked like you.”

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

Sometimes I think older brothers should not be allowed. We fall in love with them too much. They are our everything, all the while, they hurt out of sight for our sake.

and Sal gave her the rain.

the father kicked the boy, who fell back onto the two-pronged pitchfork they would use when gathering hay from the fields.

“The father very carefully cleaned and dressed the two large gashes going up the boy’s back, along his shoulder blades.

The saving hand.

“I thought of my momma and what she had said as that man shook my hand at Helen’s funeral. I thought, gee, if only someone had stopped him from growin’ up. Just ate his future away, I would still have mine.”

was calling out her world and letting her know it would win a carpenter a prize, but it’d never be a darling of the universe where the stars commit to the real thing. Every day, he

At the very best, she’d linger on the edge of the porch, reaching her hand out and testing for rain before snapping it back to her chest, swearing she’d felt a sprinkle, when in reality, it was the slight falling from her own eyes.

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.

She had numbered the steps but didn’t get to her goal of seven million before Otis and the nurses stopped her.

course, that would be thought. It’s easy to be the boulder rolling through what is left of the dandelion field when everyone has their backs turned and are looking at the already flattened ground.

Said she falsely accused her father for the same reason the ex-girlfriend had. All that man seemed guilty of was making the women in his life angry.

“As for the boy who testified, he happened to be the one who had caused the trauma that led to the police believing she’d been raped. Apparently, the two liked things a little rough. And the neighbors who said they saw the father with low hands, lingering kisses and hugs, were actually mad at him for a fence he was putting in, which they said was too far over on their property line.”

Each ribbon and clump of hair that fell, she sat a little taller, a little straighter. A drip from her forehead. A drip from her eyes. Her nose. Her cheeks. Drip, drip, drip. All sweat and tears, and yet wasn’t it the anger melting away before

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 day, I realized the linoleum was just an accessory for effect, and underneath it, he was just as fragile as us all. My

was the heart they could all be loved by, and yet not one of them loved him back. I wanted him to shout. To cancel out what they were telling themselves. To deny until he won. To shape back his hero self and put on the cape to become my perfect brother once more. But all he did was squeeze his glove and walk away.

“You don’t mind being a murderer?” “It’s better than bein’ the victim, ain’t it?”

suppose I said, I don’t want you to be gay. I don’t want you to be happy, and no, it isn’t fine that you want to be with a man.

I could feel my tears mixing with blood from my nose. This mixture felt old, like something pulled from the past. I suppose I was feeling the tears and blood of every boy before me who had a brother who would never have a wife and to whom no one had ever said that was all right.

“Well, I guess you’re a little man now, huh? Kids are never afraid of bein’ hated for somethin’, ’cause they’re still kids and easily forgiven. But men, they’re not so easily forgiven and live in fear of bein’ hated.

We’d pull her bones back to the bed. It was no longer her keeping her inside. It was us, and that turning of the tables clotted our hearts with an inescapable sorrow until we almost wished she were still afraid of the rain.

And thus I am pain in every inch of my mind, in every inch of my body. I am the endless flailing, the endless falling, the endless story of what happens to a man who cannot let go.

The group crowded around as he opened the bag and reached inside, pulling out a garter snake similar to the one Dad had set free in the woods. The bag was full of them, and one by one, the followers grabbed their own.

As soon as I threw, I knew what big sins can be made from things as small as stones. When it hit his chest, it sounded like melons being ripped apart. I waited for the howl. The scream of pain. Neither came. He was quiet and still. The stone sinking in front of him. He could have saved that one. All he had to do was to reach out and put his hand under it and he would’ve saved it. But he gave it up, to look at me. He’s still looking

“Every bruise you’ve ever had, every sharp shade of purple, blue, black, I’ve had it too. We have had the same boss of pain, we have asked the same question, over and over again, What have I done to deserve this? “There is no lack of understanding between the two of us. We’ve been part of the same crash this entire time. We just had yet to meet and pull each other from the wreckage. When you take your sweater off and reveal, it is not to reveal you alone, it is to reveal our shared selves. The purpling, black whorls something we can make fine together.”

“All right, geez.” I looked up at the sky and the God who should’ve done better. “Why does she hit you, Dresden?”

Rose by white rose, she taped his dark skin, until he was someone she could dance with. Sal in the white way, but not the right way. And yet it would not lower him, he would not let it. He was going to be dancing with Dresden Delmar, and everything else was outside the heaven of that.

“When she would speak to me, she would do so by lookin’ at the things ’round me, but only the short things like the table lamp, the silverware, the string on the shade. It was as if she looked at those short things, she could at least say, my son is taller than that there lamp, that there spoon, than that there four-inch string. There must’ve been comfort in that.

Because I would be no good for him. I was becoming his Elohim. He was becoming my Fielding. I did say to myself if I went out there with the boy and we saw a firefly, just one, I said to myself I’ll try again.

Interesting

just a beautiful instance in the myth of another chance. Yes, a myth it

Myth of another chance. Beautiful

Without him, I will stay lonely in this long way, with both ends of forever pinning me to the flames. But he deserves better than to be used as the ladder out of hell.

On the wall of her cell, she taped photos of Dresden. She called that wall her rose garden. Within the first year of her sentence, they would find her hanging in front of that garden, slowly asphyxiated by a noose of sheets.

hope this is just on your way too, Sal. We’ve got to keep movin’, don’t we? Sometimes things happen, bad things, on the way, but we’ve got to keep movin’. If we don’t, we won’t get to the next thing, and it could really be somethin’. It could be the best something of our lives.”

beautiful

“Fielding, let go or I’ll burn the house down while you’re all sleeping.”