Summertime
The sun is beating down and refracting into the thick deep air that oppresses anyone who's unfortunate enough to be outside. It's all around you, swarming like bugs-- and there are bugs. Millions of them. They bite and hiss and suck and prick you and swatting them away does nothing because you have no energy left, it's all been stolen by the muggy hot air. And sweat pours down from your face, your back, your chest, drips down your legs and there's nothing you can do about it because your shirt is already soaked and you don't have a towel or anything else with you. You don't even have pockets. All you can do is wait for the sun to go away, to hide behind the treeline and get some small respite from the beams of heat radiated down mercilessly on top of your head.
At the center of the park there are several young men playing basketball. They're jumping around and laughing. Going full speed in one direction just to shift and go full speed in the opposite direction until your breath is so far away from you that you feel you're about to pass out. They only make a few of the shots they take and there's no game. No rules. No structure. But they play nonetheless. And as the sun begins to go down behind them, the street lamp next to the rusted public net turns on. It isn't blue outside anymore, it's navy and the mosquitos come out. The street lamp is tall and shoots out a dull orange light and all the grass around it looks orange now too. The bugs begin to take shots at the players and at first they try to ignore it. Little shoots and winces of itch are nothing, really. But it keeps on. It multiplies and soon they are infested. It's a plague. The swarm has come over them the likes of which none of them have ever seen or can even fathom. It blacks out what little of the sun is left in the sky. They panic. They start to run but the millions-- no, billions-- of mosquitos cover their skin like armor and they're too weak from blood loss to swat them away. One of them falls right where he stands and the other two try to help him up, but it becomes clear in less than a weak heartbeat that they will not be able to help him at all. The two start to trudge their way to the opening of the treeline where they came from to get away but they are still caked in the little black mosquitos, so much so that they look like monsters themselves. Like something completely alien, something horrible that others would see and scream and run from. Another falls and it's only one left. This time the one doesn't even try to help the fallen, it doesn't even cross his mind. He just keeps going. Step step step step. Like a marching band. His pace getting slower from anemia. But of course he collapses too, right at the exit. Their balls are left in the court, still as rocks. And the last thing he sees in the orange light from the street lamp being covered in darkness as he is sucked to a withered gray husk.
There is a homeless man too, somewhere. Some ways away. He is wandered just as always. He has always been here. And he always will be here. He shuffles his feet from his heavy burden. He carries on his back mounds and mounds of clothes and blankets and sleeping bags. He has several layers of clothes on-- shirts and pants-- and all of this is covered on the top with the grimiest and most disgusting brown and torn rags. They are on the top because they are the least valuable of what he has so they serve perfectly to protect the good stuff. He appears, from all his layers, to have a huge hunchback. His hair is filthy and unwashed formed into clumps like on large soggy bird's nest dangling from his head. He is caked head to toe in mud like vitiligo and cracked like pavement. And he shuffles along as he always does. He does not sweat. He does not look up. He does not speak. He just shuffles along. It's hours later. Now he is shuffling blocks away from where he was shuffling before. And he wanders into a nicer neighborhood. There is a house with pillars upholding the front of it. White with a bright red door. He shuffles up to the window and looks inside. There is a family. They do not expect that anyone could see them even though their curtains are wide open. And he stands by the window and sees them. He sees them playing with each other-- a wife and husband with their two small children. He sees, unmoving, hours later, the husband take the wife down and pull up her shirt over her chin and off to show her bare body and embrace her deep and long. The homeless man watches. He has always watched. He watched when he was a child-- movies and video games. He watched other children play. He watched the wall shift into a kaleidoscope of monsters and shapes. He watched from behind tightly closed eyes as darkness from behind them shifted to moving shapes like sunspots. He watched this without sleeping. And now he watches everything forever. That is his punishment. He watches people and their lives pass away while he stays rooted to the concrete like a fire hydrant. And this goes on forever.
Some ways away, in the suburbs, there is a girl. She is young and plain looking. Her hair is bright blonde and frizzy from being dyed so often and her nails are part bloody from being bit down to nubs. She is pacing around on her front porch breathing fire in and out of her lungs from a cigarette. Inside of the house are her parents, screaming at each other like always, and they do not care who can hear them. When she was very young they cared but they have passed that point. Over the sky it's not even black even though it's night it's like a pale brown black, something ugly. The houses all look the same and it feels like there's a liminal dome over her head that keeps her from going too far away from everything. Then the tears start to well up as the "I hate yous" and the "Fuck yous" start to fly and she flies as well. She's off off off. And it's down the street and then down the other streets and eventually after almost an hour of fast walking and taking drags on cigarettes she is at a graveyard. She has not been inside before but she's passed it several times, so she figures to go in and kill time there and hopefully by the time she gets back they will be asleep. Asleep is as good as dead. She looks at all the stones and it doesn't feel as it ought to-- spooky or grim. Just feels like a yard. A yard, with stones and a gate. Then she stumbles onto an open plot and there is something below that is saying her name in a whispy and long breath. She obeys and crawls in and thinks about how it will be a cool story to tell friends or something funny to think about in the future-- sleeping in an open plot. And she drifts off. When she wakes up there is only darkness. There is a huge solid mass pressed up against her head and body and she can not move and inch. Below her are writhing things but her sight is only pure black so she can't see. There's mounds of dirt pressed up against every inch of her body putting deep pressure onto her and she can not do anything. She can't claw her way out, she can't close her eyes because it doesn't make a difference. She can't bite her nails ever again. She tries to scream but as she opens her mouth more dirt swarms into her mouth and down her throat as she gags and cries. And even though she tries to throw a tantrum there is not even a modicum of movement that is possible for her anymore and she stays as still as she will be in two days when her body gives up and she starts to rot.
In a trailer park, far outside of the city, there's a couple. They should have never met each other. The home they live in is yellow and rusted and weathered. Inside is wood panel and dim lighting, like a grandma's house. The hallways are narrow and can barely fit one person. The woman is short with black hair and is unkempt from taking care of the baby all day. She has not slept in two days, but not from lack of trying. As she wide eyed stares at the baby, who is just now calming down, she hears the roar and growl of a motorcycle approaching the house and parking just outside and it goes quiet in an instant. She feels relieved that he is home. He comes in wearing and greasy stained white T-shirt, dirty jeans and a leather jacket. His hair is black and is eyes are black as well. Not brown, they are black. He looks at her with indifference and walks past her, bumping her on the shoulder and causing her to shake the baby awake and begin crying once again. Enraged, she puts the baby down and into the crib. She goes up to him screaming, begging for help, saying all the platitudes that he's heard a million times before. "Shut up". It's calm and he only says it once. Now she's even louder and yelling at him about his responsibilities and what he needs to do. Then that's it. She's on the floor with him on top of her holding the center of her neck tight like a self-defense weapon in the moment of truth. And he brings his fist down on her head over and over and over and over again until he has skull bone digging into his knuckles. The baby is screaming and wailing and he walks into the bathroom to look at himself in the mirror and smile. He takes his shit out of his pocket and does a line before he bolts out of the door. The wailing is still constant as he fires up his motorcycle and drives off into the red and orange mixed light of the sunset across a flat horizon, listening to Alice in Chains, driving off somewhere else to do everything again. And the sun beats down on top of his head. And the air is just as thick as it was days and days and days ago.