Kool-Aid Days

Deep then in summer, the afternoons too hot to play outside, the sidewalk hopscotch boxes were blurred pastels with glints of mica catching sunlight; the sweet, musky smell of the milkman’s leftover ice rose from the hot asphalt; a lazy breeze rolled dead bees up the driveway, the paper carcasses hollowed out. In August, a rumor spreads: the paperboy has African sleeping sickness. A boy from our street is comatose from crashing his trail bike into a stack of pipes. At the Sunbeam bakery, a girl on a field trip is scalped when her ponytail gets caught in the mixer. We spend the afternoons with curtains drawn, drinking Kool-Aid, turning the TV volume up whenever the cicadas howl like sizzling insect witches. Little sister makes blueberry muffins in her Suzy Bake Oven, we watch Queen for a Day, then General Hospital. At six o’clock, from the shaded porch, I see my older sister coming home past the Admiral Lounge, cradling a bag of Ivory soap flakes and licorice. I hear a cue ball strike two others, wolf-whistles, a bar stool scraping across linoleum; a skinny man in a gray mechanic’s jumpsuit with greasy, shiny hair makes a circle with his thumb and fingers and stares at my sister walking past. She walks in her sleep sometimes too, asking if we’ve seen her Silly Putty or sock of jacks. Once I woke with her standing at the side of my bed, a paralytic consciousness, startling beauty etched in the moonlight on her face.