It’s hot for June – the kind of heat that saps the will to move or to speak. The whole earth seems to slow its pace, from the flushed green of the shade trees to the cool, mud brown flow of the creeks. There can be no thought of haste. It is the best time for books, for tales, for all the things not meant to be rushed.
Now that school is out, she reads most of the time. She sits out front on the porch swing, her bare legs tucked up on the seat and a book in her hands. Most days, she stays there till night comes and it’s too dark to see the words on the page.
When she was young, she would wait all year for the months free of school – the best days of her life. There were no rules. With four or five friends at hand, she would roam her small town. They would buy sweets, take off their shoes to wade in the brook, or climb the low limbs of trees so they could peer out from the thick leaves to watch their realm, like kings. They got in a lot of scrapes, not just the ones on arms and knees, but real ones, or at least ones that seemed big at the time. They were jeered, sworn at, chased, and warned to keep out, but they all still made it back for lunch each day. She ran and skipped a lot, then; she moved fast to take in all that she could. The world was so big.
Those months seemed short, then, but now, they seem to have no end – with less than a week gone by, she longs for the loud, cold rooms of her school; or, at least, for things to do. Most of her friends have gone off to camp, or things like that, and the ones who are left are more grown up now, and choose boys and jobs and test prep over board games and long treks through the woods. As for her…well, books are nice, but they get old fast, and she thinks that if she spends one more day in her house, she might scream. The whole town, once so huge, has shrunk on her like an old blouse in the wash.
She flings her book to the hot ground, where it tips the glass of Coke she has left there. She dips a thumb in the spilled drink, and licks a sweet sip from her hand. The thrown book soaks up the rest, and she watches the pages meld with some guilt; but the air will dry them out, and so she does not pick up it, but rolls on her back and stares up at the sky from the cracks in her porch roof.
She wants to see the world that she had heard so much of. From her small town in the south of the South, her mind drifts to lands half real, half dreamed. She likes to think of cold – ice, and hail, and snow, in some place far north where she could freeze to death. Or she dreams of the coasts – L.A., or New York – places where she could get lost, where each face she saw would be strange. One day, she will get out.
As she lies there, her skin soaked with sweat and her bones lax with heat, with her straight brown hair damp on her face and her eyes closed from the sun, she does not think that she will leave soon – that one day, trapped at work from nine a.m. until six at night, it will be these long days that she yearns for, that will stick in her heart.