The tree outside the window wobbled and tossed off light, little sparks like Instamatic flashbulbs in the moonlight. Was it a wagon or a wheelbarrow that so much depended on? Either way, nothing depends on them now.
I watched a dog creeping through the backyard shadows, stunned to still be doing God’s work early in the 21st century. He paused and listened to what he did not know was a train, a nice rhythm, the night murmuring at some safe distance. Big moving water, perhaps, where another race of dogs lived with its secrets.
The first plodding steps into September, moving resolutely into the black teeth. Soon enough the house will be smelling like a wet blanket baking, winter heat limbering up in the floorboards. And out there somewhere, sprawled behind me in the vacuum of another long night completing its free fall, are the remains of the blankest summer I can ever recall: three months on my back in the dead grass, staring up into the confused canopy of a condemned elm that obliterated the stars. A summer without a soundtrack, without a scrapbook, without a single snapshot or picture postcard to remember it by.
The wading pool in the park across the street has been drained, and the days will be marked now by nothing but the dull racket of jumping jacks and shoulder pads and the insolent gaggle of high school students shuffling along the sidewalks on their way to Taco Bell.
The cicadas are almost done; death, I suppose, the Arizona they fly off to for the winter. They burn down entire villages every autumn and flee to angel dusks. Soon enough the shuddering ghost-crying of geese evacuating across the moon and disappearing into the clouds.
It was on a night like this, somewhere across the world, that I watched as a shirtless man leaned back and coughed fire into the fog. He would swish his canteen of gasoline and nudge with his boot the tin cup at his feet. “It costs money!” he shouted. “Don’t just look!”
“How long can a man possibly breathe fire?” a bored Frenchman asked his date. “There must be other things as well. It is the same thing every night.”
“Perhaps that is what gives it the power it has,” the woman said. “The fact that there is nothing more, that this is all he has: just the fire, just the instant, repeated again and again. The poor man is clearly dying. Give him ten francs.”
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