Stagnation

A peculiar, steamy inertia dripped over the town that summer. Days resembled perpetual nuclear explosions of white-hot sunlight. Night seemed as transitory as a last-minute dream. Flowers wilted as soon as they bloom. Ticks dropped off trees onto people’s scalps, latching on with unnatural ferocity. Mosquitoes swarmed in roaming packs, biting anything that smell faintly of blood and helplessness. Movement ceased as creeks dried up, revealing primordial bones turned to stone. Odors of rotting, overripe fruit attracted flies half-blinded by ceaseless sunlight in dying orchards. It was the summer Clara waited for her lover to return.

Everybody complained about how hard it was to breathe. Sweat trickled down Clara’s back within seconds of stepping outdoors. It was an apocalyptic kind of heat that made her think of baked, desolate landscapes on planets orbiting too close to the sun. Midnight was even more generous. It brought Clara dreams of satanic ritual fires and pagans wearing goat masks. Everyone became obsessed with escaping the brilliance of the sun, obsessed with the absolute zero coldness of immense glaciers under a northern sky of black ice.

Clara must go to town to buy food. She must walk a half a mile to town and half a mile back home without collapsing from the homicidal heat. It was a simple choice between dying of heat or dying of starvation. Clara chose dying of heat. Dazzling sunshine hummed drone-like over her head, around her body, under her feet. She drank from a water bottle until it was empty. The water tasted warm and exotic, like water from the Nile River. Her body felt like it had been buried under desert sand, mummified by heat, sunlight and centuries of acridness.

No lights were on inside the village convenient store/gas station. The owner understood people would scream at him if he turned them on. Clara grabbed a two-liter of Coke, a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter and a package of vanilla cream cookies. She overheard two women talking somewhere in the store. They were discussing another woman’s pregnancy. “I wonder if this kid will be retarded like the last one”, one of them said. The other one giggled. Her laugh was mean and sharp as a wasp sting. Clara hated them. But she was waiting for her lover to take her away from this wretched place, so hating them did not consume her.

Clara walked home with her eyes closed. She wondered if eyelids would suffer from sunburn and shed dead flakes of skin. It occurred to her that a side effect of living in hell is the desire to be blind. Clara did not believe in hell but imagined this would be just like hell, minus the prancing devils poking deconstructed souls with pitchforks. It was a cruel, brilliant illumination from which there was no escape. Sometimes, there was simply no alternatives.

She thinks about her lover and other men who swarmed around her like famished bees hovering over pollen-drenched wildflowers. Since high school, men have serrated her life with a series of deep, gaping puncture wounds. They have left her inexplicably longing for conclusions without meaning, without consequences. Nothing seemed to ever make sense except the inevitable implosions of red giant stars deliberately burning themselves out. Clara considered black holes left behind by dead stars as a cosmic solution to the distracting debris left behind by annihilation.

Miraculously, night arrived. It was an exact copy of past nights except there is no moon, no stars. The blackness was mystifying, incomprehensible as the existence of subatomic particles and alternate universes. In her bed, Clara slid her body over to fill the empty spot where her lover once slept next to her. She imagined him as an elusive yet conspicuous figure standing on the vague periphery of tomorrow. She thought of the future with him and understood there would always be comedies and tragedies threatening their lives together. Nighttime brought a necessary diffusion of black fog and escape from the burden of time.

Subversions reliably occurred in Clara’s life that always threatened to invalidate her. This summer—the summer she turned 29—had been hallucinatory. She wondered if losing your mind involved dreaming every night of post-apocalyptic worlds choked by radioactive fallout and death. Strangers begged her for help in these dreams, sick people with thick, white cataracts engulfing their eyes and skin mottled by abscesses. Oddly, she rarely dreamed of her lover. Sometimes, it surprised her how little she thought of him. Instead, a seamless incandescence with the brightness of a million burning candles had started to overtake her mind. There seemed to be no room for anything else.

Darkness permitted her to sleep off regrets and the dread of improbably endings she feared yet craved with the intensity of a pathological obsession. The moment ascended and descended rapidly into a restless resolution, like somebody had thrown a grenade into the air that will never detonate. Suddenly, the black sky fractured with spectacular bursts of lightening outside her window. Raindrops struck the glass, sounding like powerful but ineffectual bullets. Clara imagined the world outside sizzling with relief, devouring the rain like a carnivore devoured flesh, greedy for sustenance, for life.

When her lover didn't come for her, Clara had no choice but to continue renting her shabby, studio apartment. She continued working nights at a factory that smelled of smoke, oil and dank demons. Days of raging thunderstorms left behind ugly clouds torn to bits. A faded rainbow hung crookedly in the sky for a few minutes. At work, Clara heard a rumor about the second-rate carnival that visited her town every summer. "One of the clowns got drunk and woke up and found the carny boss had moved on without him", the person said, laughing. "Now he's working at the gas station. The clown said he's gonna just wait until the carny returns next year and get his old job back".

It was at that moment that Clara understood if she ever lost her balance, she could always reach up and grab the pointed end of a pearly crescent moon.