SUMMER IN THE CITYTIME
Well, here we are, summer.
You know it neither through rotation of calendar nor planetary turnstile but because the white heat in the city POUNDS out of the dried surfaces their true essences so that these might rise and be absorbed into the air and lived in; pasted puddles of scaffolding spillage, leaking rubbish like untended dead piled at untended bins, fugs out of the fast food places, granulated hot bus exhaust matted to concrete walls.
A man in the busy summer bookshop is screaming at the man behind the glass and counter: THANK YOU VERY MUCH FOR UNDERSTANDING I REALLY APPRECIATE IT.
A woman in the busy summer toyshop is sitting on the floor against the toys in the middle of an aisle with all the summer shopping bags and the summer shopping kids. She might if she is still enough be mistaken for a shopping bag and might then be carried off and spared.
A man on a bicycle conjures sparks from his summer tyres as he screams to a halt at the women who crossed the road: IF I WAS A CAR YOU WOULD BE DEAD I WOULD HAVE KILLED YOU.
A man in a summer Sherlock Holmes costume shoves a man into a wall to get by.
A group of beery summer lunchtime men are STUNNED BEYOND BREATH and stop and turn to stare at a homeless man lying on top of a dotted blanket.
A teddy bear has been hefted onto spikes and barbed summer wire high above flowing frightening water.
A fly and many other flies pip onto the summer sweets in open containers in the big loud summer sweet shop that does not have any doors.
A roll of black summer cloud rolls crushingly over the citytops, darker so that it seems lower, darker and lower so that it seems less likely to go away.
Some of us are having panic attacks in the cooled basements of summer bookshops, shaking paranoid at the mental health guides.
A split open summer pigeon lies gifted to past frequented pavement with a little red pocket for the new summer winged ants.
A woman wearing most of a Donald Duck costume smokes a summer cigarette looking across at the other side of the river.
An upset man wearing most of a Papa Smurf costume is screamed at and abused by a group of young summer teenagers who throw cans and drinks at him and who will rule this strip of the riverbank and who will rule bus decks and train carriages.
Some of us are spiritually thrown by women presenting us with tinfoil flowers and telling us, ‘Tell her how you feel.’ Because there is no one they could mean.
Summer is out.
Summer legs are out.
Some of us are stagnating behind flayed bus windows, courses marked from entrance to seat by month-old snail line of crusty Dr Pepper. Our foreheads are juddering on the plastic glass from the last stop on all the way to the depot because the driver forgot to announce the termination to the stagnant and so spoiled and stale were we that we were a long way from lifting ourselves out of our seats, till the bus juddered to its stop a long way off at the depot, and we filed dazedly out into the bright, and a man slid out from between the still engines and shouted questions at our driver who apologised and said either that she did not know we were on the bus or that she thought we had wanted to go all the way to the unmarked depot, and we were given paper tickets and shown across the road from the depot to where we could mount another bus home, if we were not too stagnated, and if we were remembered.
Well, yes. It’s all aboard the summerbus to citytime.
Octobertime comes, well, soon, promises colour, desolation.
J. F. Gleeson lives in England. His work has appeared, or will soon appear, in Ligeia, Maudlin House, Sublunary Review, Bureau of Complaint, Neuro, ergot., Déraciné, Mandrake, Weird Horror, Bullshit Lit, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, here at Overheard, and other places. He has a website.
