The Summer that Melted Everything

by Tiffany McDaniel

What if this whole time we’ve just been hanging a lowercased t on our walls?”

don’t know. I just don’t know anymore. My faith is gone. How can it not be? After all, who was burned at the end of this story?” The quiet filled

“When glass is whole, it’s good. When it’s broken, it’s bad. It’s swept up. It’s thrown away. Sometimes thrown away too soon. Think of a window, Sal said. Imagine a violence breaking that window. All those shards of broken glass fall to the floor.

“Sometimes, not sweeping that bad up and throwing it away will save you in the end. It just might. So to defend the devil means defending the good of the bad. That’s what I was doing, Fielding. 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.

was us she wanted to leave. Going to all those places. She was trying to get away. That’s why she always went by herself. Why Dad always sat home alone, wondering when she was going to come back to him.

Elohim, the vegetarian, was eating black boys before they could become black men.

After all, that’s how I knew Sal was no devil. Because of the way he looked at the birds. Not as an angel who once flew, but as a boy who so wished he could.

There was a puddle for Dresden. A puddle for Granny. And one for the boy who would change us all. Sal. A puddle that never would’ve been if not for the puddle of the town’s common sense.