Summer Sons

by Lee Mandelo

Delirious, he imagined his ribs might shatter from the force and spike straight through his lungs. The uncontrollable weeping stretched on endlessly, to the start of physical pain then far past it. Streetlights hummed outside. Muscles spasmed across his sides, throat, and jaw as eventually his tension waned and he began to snuffle more than wail.

Salt gummed his eyelashes and the bridge of his nose, as if he’d continued to sob in his sleep.

Those gaps were all distant aches that didn’t require filling, only an awareness of loss. Eddie’s absence, though, cut a trough of tired need that no one else had the potential to fill up—

Eddie had never quite lost his. Riley’s was cultured over, but still audible in the vowels. Halse, though—Sam Halse talked thick and dripping when he got into it, fat vowels and stretched consonants. He had come from here and he’d die here, that was clear.

Without looking at him, Sam drawled, “All right, Andrew.” His name lay full on Sam’s tongue, the two syllables spilling out rounder, less clipped than the one. The disembodiment of the department gathering, his pretense at scholar-gentleman, dropped away at Sam’s slur on the -drew.

Love the phoneticss

“This land and the stories people tell about it are fascinating. Hauntings, massacres, dark magic—all that bloody business lingers underneath the surface of respectability. It’s a grim, delicious contradiction. I appreciate those contradictions and what they reveal about us as humans.”

Womn

“Damn, that’s wild,” Sam said. He slathered his vowels out like welcoming honey, boot grinding constant and careful onto the top of Andrew’s foot.

Phonetics bab

The ancestral home creaked at the seams with the weight of contained histories, a constant pressure that ached in his nail-beds and molars.