Summer

My song isn't anything but a nightingale riding out a gust of northerly wind when the twelve dulcet bells toll midnight. That's what I learned from Shelley, perched desperate on her ledge the night before the working-men came and tore her house down. Even Abbey, whose hands built her namesake brick by brick, she was inconsolably deaf-mute when I tried to talk her down from the letters John had cut from her poem. Blue paint? Frank had had that in spades until the hotel lobby, where his cheap guitar had failed to win him applause. Deadly venoms coursed through all of us back then; we were sweating out the vodka of 1994, crusted around our livers from a summer spent in dark alley bars reveling in the inevitability of death. Only Hal and Erin stayed away from sickness--they'd just fallen in love and needed no intoxicants other than each other. Erin in particular could not get enough of William, ever since he sang her to sleep one humid night with the ballad of a woman by him happy, and happy but for him, had not their hap been bad. Yes, no woman is safe from heartache, though her particular illusion was that the strength of her heart was more or less equal to the power of her warrior's arms. Don't get me wrong, I had lifted a car or two in college on a dare, but those were just frat-boy tricks and her taste ran towards something more in line with disaster. Aster? Hal opened up her front door, and cold September wilted away just at once. Good for her--long darkness had never been much her style, though it seemed to suit me just fine. Did I nightwalk? Nothing that base and desperate; my skin too taut and face too pretty to endure common debasement. My illusion was that I held myself to higher standards. Shelley hated bulldozers, and Frank, why did he bring himself down to die in a place so far from home? At once in that moment, I realized that for me, nothing could ever beat counting my lover's eight golden rings at least three times a day.