Simmer

August in the Carolinas

The air is still and the scent of stale earth, garbage and fading flowers seems to collect for days and fester in the crevices between buildings. The colors against a faded sky seem wilted by the constant cycle of musty mornings and torrid afternoons. Big leafy vines that once cloaked old trees and power lines with their puffed up forms now hang limply like worn rags tossed over dead wood and rusty metal skeletons.

The only vibrant color is the strange aqua glow from the nearby streetlamp - always on but whose light never reaches the ground. It’s eerie phosphorescence is out of place; the intrusion of a twilight color on the loose canvas of a feeble afternoon.

Occasionally, the skies darken and clouds gather with the portent of change and promise of rejuvenation. But the rain is warm and salty - wrung from over-tired rags of clouds which hold only yesterday's sweat. The tainted water gathers the residue of grime from the streets in dirty puddles that linger and stagnate under the shimmering haze of heat rising from the pavement into heavy air too saturated to absorb one more drop of the damp.

The evening is apocalyptic. Colorless against a dim, twilit sky, the silhouette of a chain link fence frames the gaping expanse of an empty parking lot where random tufts of grass grow through cracks that have become fissures in the asphalt. Not a car ever passes to leave trails of light or sound, but on the corner, a stoplight ridiculously cycles through it’s garish colors for an audience of silent streets and vacant buildings. Even the shadowy swarms of insects that live in the cone shaped worlds under streetlights are noticeably absent.

Under the shed roof of the porch, red dust from the brick wall stains the concrete floor. The wooden weight of my wind chime sways disturbingly without the hint of a breeze, infrequently striking only a single hollow tube or a discordant pair, and the faint shallow sound is startlingly bright in the dead calm of a lifeless night. A fuzzy moon floats in an empty sky, carried up by the last painful breaths of the dying day.