CIRRUS
It was a vicious summer.
We were screeching and tarsticky children under the [high riotous sky][IN WHICH I DON'T SAVE YOU] and it was a skinned knee vicious summer.
It was a riotous summer. The warp and weft of the days pulled together into something long and wending like the long legs of our fathers and the tickheavy long grass to our chests. It was a long summer.
It was hot that summer. The children were sticky with twining fingers and firefly tails, trailing mudstreams and dustbeams into opened-doored garages with palms full of scavenged rocks and coins.
It was hot. Barefoot, splitheel summer, voices breaking over the sticky grass and seashell whistles, summer rot, bicycle pedal gouges in the shin. In the midnight morning our metal mouths shone like bright treasure and our mothers feared us from their bright kitchens, their windows open, our screams the neighborhood’s [loudest roar][roar].