It gets so fucking hot sometimes that it’s an effort to just breathe, you know. And the air is dry as dust or crackers and there’s a stillness to everything like even clocks has stopped. Ain’t no flies fizzing over shit and there ain’t no birds bothering to sing, not nowhere.
The sky on them days, is so blue I swear it don’t look real. I reckon as kids see them skies and it gets burned onto their memories cos that’s how they paint the sky in their pictures. And the sun painted yellow as butter or cheese.
And if you spit in the street, it dries as soon as it hits the ground and it almost sizzles like something cooking. And the air ripples, as though the whole town is dissolving in water. And the tar on the road gets a little sticky underfoot and it bleeds black and it smells new laid.
I swear it’s just too hot by the middle of the day – too hot for working or fucking or anything. And I ain’t the only one as thinks so. The shutters come down on the stores and everywhere shuts up for the afternoon and it’s like the whole goddam town is sleeping or dead.
And we sit idle on the sidewalk, me and Tony and Frank and Ed. We sit chewing the fat and setting the world to rights and waxing lyrical over Judy and Marie and Kitty – girls who sit on the other side of the street, sitting in the shade and sitting pretty with their dresses hitched up above their knees and buttons on their dresses all unfastened, and fanning themselves with the books they ain’t bothering to read.
Ed says as how he’s a mind to walk right across the street and ask Kitty to come dancing with him on Friday night. ‘Cept, he says, it’s too bloody hot to do anything. Frank laughs, cos we all know as Ed ain’t got the balls to do what he says he would. And Tony just keeps looking at Marie and smiling at her and winking, and she pretends not to see. And me and Judy, well we got something going on, and we’re keeping it a secret just the now, and I’m trying not to turn my attention her way and she’s doing the same with me.
And these hot days, when the sweat sticks my shirt to my back, and the dog lies panting and spread-eagled beside me on the sidewalk, and Tony and Frank and Ed the same, in my head I’m thinking of Judy and the cool of her bedroom, cool like a blessing, and a fan blowing the air around, and she’s kissing me, and touching, and I’m doing the same to her; but right now it’s just too hot for anything more than considering.
And Ed says again if it wasn’t so fucking hot, he’d cross the street in a second and he’d get Kitty to her feet and dance in the road and he wouldn’t mind who saw, and none of us has the strength or the will to call him out on what’s saying and so he grows more bold in his airless declarations.
Patricia Ann McNair 
It gets so fucking hot sometimes that it’s an effort to just breathe, you know. And the air is dry as dust or crackers and there’s a stillness to everything like even clocks has stopped. Ain’t no flies fizzing over shit and there ain’t no birds bothering to sing, not nowhere.
The sky on them days, is so blue I swear it don’t look real. I reckon as kids see them skies and it gets burned onto their memories cos that’s how they paint the sky in their pictures. And the sun painted yellow as butter or cheese.
And if you spit in the street, it dries as soon as it hits the ground and it almost sizzles like something cooking. And the air ripples, as though the whole town is dissolving in water. And the tar on the road gets a little sticky underfoot and it bleeds black and it smells new laid.
I swear it’s just too hot by the middle of the day – too hot for working or fucking or anything. And I ain’t the only one as thinks so. The shutters come down on the stores and everywhere shuts up for the afternoon and it’s like the whole goddam town is sleeping or dead.
And we sit idle on the sidewalk, me and Tony and Frank and Ed. We sit chewing the fat and setting the world to rights and waxing lyrical over Judy and Marie and Kitty – girls who sit on the other side of the street, sitting in the shade and sitting pretty with their dresses hitched up above their knees and buttons on their dresses all unfastened, and fanning themselves with the books they ain’t bothering to read.
Ed says as how he’s a mind to walk right across the street and ask Kitty to come dancing with him on Friday night. ‘Cept, he says, it’s too bloody hot to do anything. Frank laughs, cos we all know as Ed ain’t got the balls to do what he says he would. And Tony just keeps looking at Marie and smiling at her and winking, and she pretends not to see. And me and Judy, well we got something going on, and we’re keeping it a secret just the now, and I’m trying not to turn my attention her way and she’s doing the same with me.
And these hot days, when the sweat sticks my shirt to my back, and the dog lies panting and spread-eagled beside me on the sidewalk, and Tony and Frank and Ed the same, in my head I’m thinking of Judy and the cool of her bedroom, cool like a blessing, and a fan blowing the air around, and she’s kissing me, and touching, and I’m doing the same to her; but right now it’s just too hot for anything more than considering.
And Ed says again if it wasn’t so fucking hot, he’d cross the street in a second and he’d get Kitty to her feet and dance in the road and he wouldn’t mind who saw, and none of us has the strength or the will to call him out on what’s saying and so he grows more bold in his airless declarations.