Texas summer sun swelters well into September. The leaves stay green and heat waves still linger over roads. The air is too thick and the blacktop stove sears through my shoes. I pray for late November to come save me from the sun’s unrelenting fury. I sleep, stickily clothed, soaked in sweat.
There is no escape from the constant suffocation other than rare cool fronts that offer false hope of relief.
October. Makeup grease paint melts and flows down the contours of costumed partygoers’ faces. The faces are unreadable, uncanny. The grease pools in eye cavities and sodden lips are smudged all over. Gelatinous strands slowly gravitate towards the ground off of chins creating colored drops and drizzles. They hit asphalt where they sizzle and burn, desperation vaporizing into the air. It’s far more horrifying than what any manufactured forty-dollar plastic Halloween costume could offer. I drown in the sea of neon nylon knee highs and putrid perspiration.
Plastic pumpkins set out by the city as a part of their “#1 Halloween Town Extraveganza!!!” twist and warp, like jack-o-lanterns left out to rot weeks after the big day. The lights they put up in the trees explode and rain midair, a glass grenade that doesn't discriminate. It hits everyone in that terrible sea.
The swelter never cooperates with capitalism’s manufactured seasonal demands.
It’s the absurdity of it all. People are wearing thick down jackets and fleece scarves prematurely and paying the price in red faces and wet hair. Decorations start to dot porches, depicting autumn leaves and cornucopias, but the real leaves have not turned yet, and no abundance is to be found. By now, I’ve learned to just eat my pumpkin pie and shut the fuck up about it.
I wait for that start-up rattle of the air conditioner, for when it steadies into its gentle hum is the moment I can breathe again. I watch the clock and listen to the ticking, each second louder than the last. It’s nothing in the grand span of months, but I can't help the anxious waiting. I am always waiting.
Aestival, you have no part here, I beg of you, please leave. Come November, you will die and resurrect by March. The cycle will repeat, and again I will plead.
Aestival, you answer to no one. No one but dear Bluestem, Turk’s Cap, and Frostweed.
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