HEAT
Dorothy Parker knew heat speeds the rot. As she wrote in her poem, “August”:
When my arms are elder-bushes,
And the rangy lilac pushes
Upward, upward through my heart;
Summer, do your worst!
The light lingers, the fire burns, heat transforms us all.
The Piano Man
Word Count 2021
I pulled back the blue plastic tarp, lifted the keyboard cover. My hands, with their squared off fingernails and trimmed cuticles, easily found middle C. Two octaves of the C major scale pierced the afternoon heat in the workshop barn at my in-laws' house. The piano sounded decent enough considering it had sat, ignored for five years. There were no windows or skylights. No plumbing. No cooling. No heating.
I was about to move to Vienna to re-join my husband after a lengthy separation. Before moving overseas, I asked my son if he wanted the piano. Like me, he started taking piano lessons in first grade. He knew this was the piano my father learned to play as a boy. But shipping it to him in Las Vegas would cost more than the piano was worth
A Day at the Beach
Word Count 931
We were starting the moat on our sand castle when Laurence announced she was hot and was going for a swim.
“Mom said we couldn’t,” I reminded her.
Wanting to run errands between our practice sessions at the rink, Mother had dropped us three skaters at Nahant Beach an hour earlier with one admonition: under no circumstances were we to go in the water. Hurricane Diane had roared through New England two days earlier and rip current warnings were posted.
Ignoring our warning, budding poet Laurence, noting the waves beckoned “like a siren,” slipped off her shoes and ran into the ocean. Lynn and I continued digging our trench, keeping an eye on her bobbing head until we realized we were tracking the wrong one. Laurence was nowhere in sight.
Wear Sunscreen!
Word Count 954
For my 15th birthday, my father gave me a pair of skis. It was a bizarre present on many levels. For one thing, he hadn’t paid child support to my mother for several years so any gifts from him—especially such a generous one—came freighted with resentment. Why do you have money for skis but not child support? But if I raised an objection, I knew he would say, “Okay, forget it,” in which case, there would be neither child support nor skis. So I said, “Thanks.” I guess?
It was an odd gift in other ways. We lived in Tennessee, where there were no mountains for skiing. Plus, nobody in my family skied. But the year before, I had left home for boarding school in New Hampshire, where one of the afternoon winter sports was downhill skiing. The image of his daughter schussing down the mountain must have roused some long dormant ambition in him on my behalf.
Cooking With Fire
Word Count 667
My family and I all stood around the campfire set off in a field as the night's chill pressed in. Off in the distance, we could see the lights of the nearest small town and above an amazing splash of stars. On the grill was the rabbit my father had that morning shot and killed. Every once in a while there would be a small flare-up when a buckshot pellet released from the ever-shrinking creature fell into the fire. I remember there were only two choices, face the fire and its intense heat while your back froze or vice versa.
That morning as my father set out to kill said rabbit, I felt inordinately proud. This was survival at its most elemental.
The Big Hot House
Word Count 1229
Only five guys showed up for the class. Each had a ratty washcloth wrapped around his neck. They were meant to serve as personal cooling devices. But any coolness the cloth once held had long since given way to the building's oppressive heat.
When it's hot outdoors, it's even hotter inside prison.
There is zero circulation, no windows, no fresh air.
I've never been inside a residential cell block, but the guys tell me that even the walls sweat. Air conditioning? Not something taxpayers will ante up for. In Southern states, where indoor temperatures routinely exceed 100 degrees, prisoners have claimed that the brutal heat violates the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment.
Not Sweater Weather
Word Count 765
The summer of 1987 was among the hottest on record. The New York Times reported that from Ponca City, OK to Paducah, KY, eighty people died during the many weeks of 100-degree temperatures. We were living in a condo in West Haven, CT, a location we stumbled on accidentally and knew little about. Although our condo was set directly on Long Island Sound, the high temps were oppressive and relentless. Our condo was a mere two blocks from the beach, but it lacked air conditioning or even cross ventilation. The Sound itself was no relief as that summer it was so polluted with toxins and debris from medical waste that governmental authorities deemed entering it unsafe. I was heavily pregnant that summer with our firstborn and completely miserable and isolated.
Burning Down the House
Word Count 1317
All escapes lead back to fire. I glance at the open book of matches. Will Mum and Dad's violent night fights combust into a day fight?
While Mum was asleep, I went downstairs to the spare room we call the "extra" room, where Dad has been sleeping, to ask him for French toast. It's Saturday, and I wanted something special, a break from the constant bickering, and the news that Dad would be moving out.
It's 1975. I'm 10.
Dad, in his usual weekend-morning cut-off khakis and white t-shirt, came up, groggy, smelling fusty from cigarettes and the general storage whiff of the extra room. He took out bread, whisked a bowl of milk and egg. It felt almost normal in the kitchen.
A Huge, Sunwarmed Animal
Word Count 753
Summer, by Edith Wharton, is a largely overlooked masterpiece by an author best known for her gilded age novels about love among the upperclass. Fortunes are made; hearts are broken--that sort of thing. Summer concerns the story of sullen Charity Royal, a 17 year old orphan rescued from “the mountain” (a latter day equivalent of the wrong side of the tracks) to a small, Massachusetts town, where she tends the library and fends off the advances of her savior, an old man with a drinking problem. She sits around books all day, but her mind is untouched by their content. One day, a handsome young man enters the library and changes her life forever.
Fever
Word Count 768
Mom was on the couch shivering under a blanket.
I felt her forehead. She was hot.
"I think you are running a fever. I'll grab the thermometer."
It was one more twist in a surreal weekend.
I was 26 and living in Manhattan. Dad had flown to a furniture show, John? was in college, Chris? in Boston, and I didn't want Mom home alone.
The prior year, during our weekly phone calls, I had sensed something was different. It's funny what you hear when you can't see.
A Beijing Summer
Word Count 1034
I never expected to spend a summer sharing my single dorm bed with four two-liter bottles of Coca-Cola. But that’s what survival looked like in my early twenties.
My college sat in the oldest part of Beijing, tucked deep inside the tourist-filled Hutongs. Each morning, visitors rolled past on three-wheeled pedicabs with their cameras raised. I sometimes wondered how many vacation albums I’ve accidentally appeared in - hair unbrushed, eyes swollen, rushing to class with a steamed bao half in my mouth.
The electrical wiring in our neighborhood was too old to support air conditioning - or so the school told us. Beijing summers grew hotter each year; some nights stayed above ninety degrees well past midnight. The dorm rooms turned into sealed jars. Students had two choices: press their spines against the cool wall and hug oversized bottles of chilled liquid, or give up on sleep altogether and flee into the night.
The Heat Wimp
Word Count 893
I live in a famously overcast city, known for rainy summers and dreary winters. The rare sunny day lifts my spirits, imbues me with a sense of animal wellbeing. I love sunshine, but I don’t trust it. The sun can ruin me. It proves it in round after round.
Round One:
When I was fourteen, I went to Lewiston, Idaho for the drag races. My boyfriend, who eventually became my first husband, had extensively modified his Duster 340 with a gas-guzzling carburetor, bored-out cylinders, and disappeared mufflers in a quest to make it go faster. He was excited to test it out, so we raided his parents' pantry for a weekend’s worth of canned food and hit the road.