Heat Wave

A heat wave strangles the life out of the summer that forty-year-old Muriel Winslow returns to her childhood home of Sampleville, Ohio to attempt sobriety. It’s the first time in her life she has even considered sobriety and intends to evict the demons by foreclosing on her past. She realized that staying in NYC to pursue sobriety would be an act of self-sabotage. Resisting daily glasses of wine and nightly martinis while entombing herself in her apartment would be as futile as the filaments of clouds thinking they could prevent the sun from skinning the sky alive.

Stepping outside her motel room is like entering a post-apocalyptic world. Perhaps a nuclear bomb had detonated somewhere in Ohio but not close enough to Sampleville to evaporate everything. Muriel presumes it is possible that ashes could begin drifting down from the scorched sky. Wildflowers have wilted and bled over the cracked earth. Leaves are curling into tiny hands begging for rain. The air smells scorched and embalmed like the interior of a mummy’s tomb might smell after thousands of years of stagnation. Muriel sleeps in front of the air conditioner every night. She takes a sedative to help her sleep and another pill to suppress alcohol cravings. The sedatives work better than the other pills. The sedatives allow her to sleep dreamlessly, free from thoughts and memories pinching her with sadistic fingers.

Muriel drinks from a bottle of whiskey her boyfriend Carl shoplifted from Joe’s One-Stop Liquor store. She feels unnaturally euphoric, emotionally rootless, madly in love with the boy sitting close to her in the front seat of his car. She never dreamed that being drunk could make her feel so…liberated.  She thinks of sand falling through the midpoint of an hourglass, fleeing inertia through a portal that has always been there, waiting to be discovered.

“No wonder my mother is an alcoholic,” she suddenly hears herself saying to Carl. He laughs slightly, quietly, and begins taking off her shirt. A feeling of uneasiness and dread shoots through her body like a lightning bolt viciously stabs at a dark sky. She isn’t prepared for the twinge of empathy she has for her mother, such an unnerving feeling that she grabs the almost-empty bottle of whisky and gulps what’s left. After making out with Carl, she is relieved to understand that nothing is sticking to the inside of her skull. All feelings and thoughts have been obliterated. She passes out, wakes up in the morning, and anticipates getting intoxicated again.

Muriel leaves the Motel 6 in Sampleville, carrying her laptop in a black bag embossed with the name of her publisher—Cohen and Catskill. She wears a floppy white hat, white flats, and a white halter dress she bought with the advance from her unpublished book Blacking Out at Midnight. Muriel walks three blocks to sit in the diner she has visited every afternoon for the past two weeks. She is attempting to finish her novel at the diner in between staring at the liquor store across the street and listening to the diner’s midday customers. The “regulars” are already there when she arrives, five middle-aged women carrying Bibles, wearing knee-length shorts, white sandals, and gray sleeveless blouses. Listening to their bizarre conversations gives her reason to stop and procrastinate when she can’t think of anything to write.

The diner women believe that the end of the world is imminent, that the intense heat is an irrefutable sign of the end times. They believe the heat wave is supernatural in origin. Muriel is mystified by their oddly giddy demeanor. They seem almost thrilled by the idea that the end of the world is happening. They straggle into the diner with exuberant expressions, mopping their foreheads with white handkerchiefs. They brush flies away from their pieces of coconut cream pie and talk about each other’s prophetic dreams in hushed voices. Their mouths distort into astonished holes that rip open their pale, fabric-like faces as they endlessly dissect Biblical passages with their own interpretations.

Muriel notices that one of the women doesn’t say much. She listens to what her friends say, picks at her pie with a plastic fork, and drinks several cups of coffee. The quiet woman drinks her coffee black—no sugar, no cream, nothing. Muriel had only known one other person who drank their coffee bitter and black…

Justin was the most beautiful man she had ever seen. He had a symmetrically flawless face carved with a surgical precision known only to deities. He was a freelance artist and a functioning heroin addict. He had shelves and bookcases scattered around his apartment filled with chipped porcelain figures. When she asked him why he collected broken knick-knacks, he said he felt sorry for them. He was 22, with black curly hair and neon blue eyes. She was 38 and believed she was in love for the first time. She thought she could get him off heroin. Justin thought he could get her off alcohol. In the end, Muriel found him dead from an overdose, the needle still sticking out of his fleshy inner elbow.

Muriel plans on visiting her mother’s grave while staying in Sampleville but tries to convince herself she will be unable to find the grave. Perhaps the earth has already swallowed the small, flat gravestone. Perhaps the gravestone has crumbled, or the stone is hidden by an overgrowth of stinging nettle weeds and crabgrass. She eventually decided not to go. It would not change the trajectory of things, anyway.

Days pass and heat wave persists. Muriel’s desire to drink also persists. She stops taking the white pills after realizing she is failing to amputate herself from the damaged Muriel who wants to stay functionally intoxicated all the time, just drunk enough to write, sleep it off, drink, write, sleep it off again. Dumping herself in Sampleville parallels a doomed archeological expedition. She is the leader of a catastrophic excavation project that unearthed nothing valuable, nothing salvageable, only people burying themselves alive in delusions. She has not molted and emerged from a chrysalis with new skin and functional wings. She vows to herself that she will never entertain that delusion again.

On the 28^th day of her sobriety, Muriel knows she is watching the setting sun gouge chunks of well-done flesh out of the Sampleville horizon for the last time. It suddenly occurs to her that she has no idea why she attempted this failed purification ritual in the first place or why she believed she would experience a catharsis by coming here. She has learned that Sampleville is a vestigial structure with no purpose, no right to intrude in her life, and no power over her.

She will return to the city, where the air reeks of rotting garbage and infected wounds, and the sky is always the color of grimy pigeon feathers. Bodies lie next to overflowing garbage cans in menacing alleys and nobody cares. Psychopaths wander the city and nobody cares. Muriel will drink and wander the city and nobody will care. She will finish her novel and begin another one titled "Heat Wave". She will dedicate it to the silent woman in the diner who drank black coffee and refused, with dignity, to conform.