All Summer
Claudia Smith
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End of May
Either the postcard-bright sting of chlorine in an emptied pool, scrubbed after the bodies were found, or the sour-sweet algae of early summer at a motel with window units. Or could be the mosquitoes through the cracked window with no screen, or the houseflies, the dusty blinds drawn to spare us. Or the Reese’s melting in the back of the deep cupboard I won’t wipe down.
I don’t want to open cupboards this time. Last summer there were rats. Now they’re still in the attic, mummified.
I’m done with devotion and what my mother taught me. She died in spring, but it was summer when I felt her gone. I was born in a hot place. Summer is what I belong to, sweltering and putrid, the damp corners where we took shelter.
June
The sun leaks like dripping ice, and I’m leaking too, from my eyes, from my armpits. Hidradenitis suppurativa, Texas summers, blooming inward then swelling into purple knots. I wash with Head and Shoulders, with Hibiclens, but it oozes into the cotton at my breasts.
Why is it in summer I’m always leaking?
After the miscarriage, no one tells you your milk will still come. I filled up, just about ready to burst. Is it normal to have pimples on your breasts? I asked my mother once. She said she never had cramps. She didn’t know.
I do know she had milk for years after her children stopped nursing. She weaned me at five months. She was proud of that. She also told me it disgusted my father to see her nursing. She was thin and I was obscene, swollen even at thirteen.
My mother has been gone six years now. Enough people have failed me. I’ve failed enough people. Why am I still so hard on her? I tell my own daughter she is beautiful. It’s a kind of inoculation.
I don’t dream of my mother. I never have. I’ve asked her quietly to come to me. Instead I dream of a house, a rat eating old peanut-butter cups, a friend from college who lied to me and now says she is my mother, which is just another lie. I don’t want to think about you, I tell her in the dream, you who are still living. I want my own mother to come and scold me, or tell me she was wrong, how she was so very wrong.
I say the things I would never say if she were here. She sets her jaw when you say what she doesn’t want to hear.
He never hit you hard enough to break, she says.
Or maybe she says, He never hit me hard enough to break my face.
Let me tell you. I’m a teacher, just like she was. So I can sleep in the summertime when grades are in. I run the central AC at seventy-five degrees, windows closed against tree roaches and flies and mosquitoes. There’s a pool under an unhealthy palm tree about a hundred feet from my apartment door. Home ownership is not for me, Mom.
I can walk to a tiny lake and listen to the frogs sing. Cicadas are here now, which means it’s summer. The magnolias drip their lemony petals. Cicadas sing. I remember when I thought that meant the trees were singing.
Was it you who explained it to me?
I never saw them, only their husks. Finding one was a treasure, the shell the color of weak tea, translucent amber, the thin architecture of a body left behind. I wanted them to be evidence of fairies or something unearthly. I couldn’t decide if they were beautiful or horrid.
I remember one in my open palm, its back split cleanly down the spine. If you searched, you’d find them, legs hooked and stubborn, gripping bark. Up close you could see the empty eye domes, filmy and blind, the hollow thorax where muscle once pressed. It weighed almost nothing. My brother liked to crumble them into papery dust.
They never made me sad. They weren’t corpses, only husks.
July
Mom, the U.S. of A. is two hundred fifty years old. I drive through Sugar Land, past Braeswood, and see the flags. I read online that the president is planning a UFC fight on the White House lawn, though maybe that was AI. I can’t always tell anymore.
What about our bicentennial? You were twenty-eight. I was six, almost seven. Your sister stitched us matching peasant dresses, brown bodices edged in zigzag bric-a-brac. I think there were flowers embroidered.
We lit candles. You made a shrimp boil. Our feet were bare. I was assigned the shelling. That smaller me was still yours, entirely yours, until I wasn’t. Two hundred years might as well have been a thousand. You served my feast on a sage-green Holly Hobbie Bicentennial plate.
It’s raining now, late morning. My daughter stirs in the room across from mine. I know this rain. It’s the hot kind that brings no relief. There was a movie I loved when I was her age, Somewhere in Time, about a man who wills himself back because he loves a woman in a portrait so much that time cannot keep him from her. She was pale and luminous, hair gathered in a soft Edwardian sweep, loose tendrils at her temples, the color of honey rinsed in light. Her face long and fine-boned, the mouth composed, as if trained not to betray feeling too quickly. Her eyes cool gray-blue, steady and already distant. I decided she had your eyes. I decided that was what made her beautiful. I thought Olivia Hussey and Jane Seymour the most beautiful women in the world. I wanted to be them. I wanted to run cool as you did.
If I close my eyes and ask Alexa to play distant thunderstorm to accompany this thunderstorm, can I will myself back to the screened-in porch, to your cool gray eyes, to your hand light at the back of my neck as I peel?
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Claudia Smith is the author of two flash fiction collections, The Sky Is A Well And Other Shorts (Rose Metal Press) and Put Your Head In My Lap (Future Tense Books), as well as the story collection Quarry Light (Magic Helicopter Press). Her writing has appeared in The Texas Review (a few years ago), LitHub, The Rumpus, and Norton’s The New Sudden Fiction and New Micro anthologies.
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Posted in Vignettes: A Literary Photo Album : JUL '26 and tagged in #CNF, #boudin, #creative nonfiction, Creative Nonfiction