TDI2789

The summer was so hot the dogs stuck to the sidewalks with the newspapers and the black metal cans everyone left waiting on the curb. You could smell it in the glass pitchers on table tops, and the sheets that never dried on the clothes lines; the canvas beach bags mothers dragged wearily across the sand and the ice cream trucks melting across the highways. Children felt it open up the windows at night and find a corner of the bed to smother, while fathers baited it on hooks or mowed it down in flat, dry stripes as if begging each other to escape. And the crickets just hummed beneath the corn silk and the dry mouth