In My Field Of Paper Flowers

He passes the rabbit every day.  The fresh reds of new roadkill have dulled to browns and pink roapy insides have shriveled grey.  The fur has faded, sun-bleached.  The big teeth are pushed further out by rotting gums.  Every day, it is a little bit worse.  He can smell it from 100 steps away.  Yesterday it didn’t stink until 50 steps.  That poor rabbit in the road, one reanimated by ants and stripped by turkey vultures.  It smells like sweet and sour chicken from the shitty Chinese food place at the top of the block.  It smells like the fancy cheese that his mom used to buy for wine nights.  

The air conditioning broke last night, spewing lukewarm water under the window unit.  Without it, the night was smothering;  he now knows how babies feel in their last moments before the frustrated mother presses the pillow to their faces.  The air is thicker than tar and greasy in his lungs.  Walking feels more like swimming.  Humidity so thick that he should be able to walk up it like a staircase and have it hold his weight.

The street is V-shaped, half downhill and the second half just as steep up.  It’s impossible to enjoy the walk down the slope because all he can see is the incline ahead of him.  

He takes a cigarette out of the packet and, before he can get his own lighter, the sun strikes a spark and a soft orange glow on the end of it.  He takes a long drag and the air coming out the back of the cigarette is cooled by menthol.

He looks up into the sky at a sun that should have sunglasses and a big wide smile.

He thinks of that tune from nursery school.

Mr. Sun, Sun/Mr. Golden Sun/Please Shine Down On Me

Mr. Sun, Sun/Mr. Golden Sun/Smiling Through The Trees

Mr. Sun, Sun/Mr. Golden Sun/Please Shine Down On Me

He can feel the rubber of his sneakers becoming sticky and malleable.  He leaves prints behind him, melted sole leaving little raised spikes.  The shoe begins to thin and he can feel the griddle-hot street beneath him.  

He has to get to work, though.  He sees indents in the street where a car left tire tracks in the putty-soft cement.  He uses them as footholds and grasps as he scales the dreaded incline.  Every day he climbs to the top of it, and every day there is no reward or accomplishment, just the knowledge that he will have to repeat the task tomorrow.  

From the top of the hill, the tallest point in town, he can see that the parking lot behind the Episcopalian church has turned into a gooey black pond and half-swallowed some of the cars that had been left there overnight.  

He finishes his cigarette and takes out another, waving it slightly in front of his face before the sunlight lights it for him.  His lungs feel a minty sting.  The smoke was less oppressive than the uncut air.  

He sweats so badly that he carries an extra shirt in his backpack, which only weighs him down and makes him sweat more.  His skin is red and raw with friction under his arms and in his lap. 

He thinks, like he has since the beginning of the heatwave, that this smoldering world must be hell.  The roots of trees rise up out of the arid soil.  Houses have begun to tilt on their failing foundations.  Dogs dry up into dust and blow away on the rare merciful breezes.  The skeletons of outdoor cats who were on the sidewalk at the wrong time of day when the street turned to soup and trapped them to perish in the heat stick up like small memorials to a better word lost.

People try to pretend that all of this is normal.  They put paper flowers on popsicle sticks and color them with markers to fill their garden.  They tried coloring it with crayon but the wax dripped right off the paper.  Old women sit in their air conditioning and ink their wrinkled fingers trying to pretend like the world isn’t burning.

The world will burn, though, and he is glad he doesn’t have to watch it burn from his hometown.  He doesn't think he could stand to see his mother combust.  He doesn't want to watch his childhood home flicker into an inferno.  He doesn't want to have to see his own dog die like all the dogs die in the heat.  He remembers when they only died in cars with the windows rolled up.  He remembers, very distantly, that it used to snow for half a year. Now, there is only the unyielding heatwave, smoldering greed burning everything to ash and dust.

He wishes that all the leaders who ignored the scientists who warned of the heat wave would feel its wrath, but they have all taken to underground bunkers where real flowers grow. They decided that it was better to have money than a world he could survive in, even if there was nothing left to spend the money on.  His hate is its own heatwave, boiling out from under his sun-pinkened skin.  This was a choice.  The only green they cared about was money, and even that was becoming sun-bleached and pale.  He thinks of the water they used to wastefully pour on their lawns.  They had all been fools.

When he woke up in the morning, his goldfish had boiled alive in its bowl.  This is the new normal.  This is the choice that was made for him.  The task never ends, while the rich are safe inside of refrigerated cellars and traveling by plane he will push himself up the hill with no satisfaction, only the dreaded repetition of this despised task.  But that is just how life is in the heat wave.  He thinks he will eat the boiled goldfish for dinner.  

And so our Sisyphus pushes himself up the hill like a bolder that will only roll down on the next shift.