When the Summer is Long…

I am not amused, she said but it wasn’t funny anymore. Here in this place, with the stinking heat bearing down on us and half a curdling milkshake in my stomach. I lurch, and reach out but realise I’m sitting still. The couch cushions are glued to my thighs, and I smell the leather and sweet sweat around us.

She’s standing in front of me, all legs for all I can tell. Just a long, distorted shadow in a daze of glare, looming but not really there at all. She doesn’t see me for all the anger in her voice.

Sit here, she says. Stay still, she says.

I nod, so much of nothing in this spot. I don’t recall a time before this time. She wants to go upstairs, get back to screwing the milk man. Well, the guy who made the milkshake anyway so it’s close enough. The guy who comes in the afternoon with his beer, cigarettes and tiny bags of dust. They laugh together, getting high while they hold hands and never once look in my direction. I can hear them now. The jerking bedsprings bounce down the stairs towards me, and set my pulse pounding in my ears. My head aches with the rhythm. I sit like a statue, fading in and out, and in and out with the movement of my breath through the waves of light around me.

There will be other times like this. I will stay where I am told, and do as I am bid because I am not really here, and because I am a good child. An obedient child, a quiet child, the girl who doesn’t mind the loneliness and the emptiness of a room filled only with heat and dust. I am the dust too, and I watch it swirl between the shafts of light. I fall and rise and dance with it, as I dream of turning invisible, fading away. You know the dust shines brightest just before it disappears.