Thursday, June 24, 2010

June Prose

The air conditioning in the lobby is incredible, and the rush of hot, wet air that hits my skin as I push through the outer doors is a relief, at least for a moment. Humidity is fickle like that. The dessert heat burned and scorched, killing you quickly and impersonally. This heat is worse perhaps, because it does not kill impersonally. It lives and breaths and creeps into your nose and lungs. This heat does not kiss your skin like sunlight, it invades you and transforms you. I can feel my hair rising, curling and waving with the hot, wet air. My skin feels more alive and less my own. This heat does not kill you. It consumes you.

The pigeons have it in for me, you know. They wait, just there across the street. Innocently pecking through a crushed mound of potato chips or bread, dipping into the fountain specked with sunlight and fungus. As though they do not see me coming, as though they have no intentions toward me at all. But they are too quiet now. I do not trust these pigeons. See? The fat one, there! He'll be the one today. His turn to fly at me, just past my face. A great fat flutter of gray wings and feathers, like cigarette butts and death.

The sun is here, of course. She's everywhere, that whore. That great glowing Grushenka. She'll steal it all from me, one day. Ruin me, like Katerina.

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