here I will put stuff that is incomplete or that I don't plan on using much and you can all critique it to hell.
The Ifrit and The Mirage
Here is where the heat refuses to leave. Here, a Fahrenheit canopy stretches from the pacific coast to the iced Sierra Nevada,. The burden of a valley’s summer, the popcorn setting on God’s microwave, the three month sauna, or less eloquently put, July in Sacramento feels like a sweaty ass hovering over the highline of your brow. It’s stale and dusty in spite of the sweat, like old furniture you dug out of your garage or attic, fashioning a scent that you’d normally wash away with a paper towel and Pledge. Here though, the dust particles and mustiness chokes away your stroll in the park, erases your day out on the river, and shortens your shopping spree with a few select, timely friends wearing bonnets and bug eyed sunglasses. So it is at this hour that the outdoor malls and sidewalks are a bit more vacant, nearer to desertion. On busy streets, the armrests of parked car doors burn at the touch, the steering wheels turned in towards the sidewalk blister the fingers of careless children. The man passing by the parked cars burns alongside them, the heat flattening his middle aged chest, the billowing of lungs that were once strong now suddenly become diplomatic.. The sidewalks became more empty, the movement of life more restrained.. This is what the people whine about in their small talk, the heat and the nothingness it brings, so they seek relief, dreaming of air conditioning and a cool night.
The cycle of days passes slowly, as the season becomes longer each year. The sun becomes more obstinate, a demon spinning through the marsh and leaving it a desert. Immigrant generations curse over cigarette ash as they finish off Wednesday dinner. Some family members wait to begin their nightly routine of dishes, nightwear, toothbrush, television, a final prayer. Others in the family sit in their room, planning escape and gear shifts. House doors lock and sprinkler heads pop up from one end of the housing plan to the end of the next housing plan. Everything around is structure or automobile.
Evening nears at a downtown creperie and life begins to jostle again, faces emerge out of cars and duck into flyer covered, plexiglass doors. Sweat becomes less a constant factor as gray mixes into the sky and shadows stretch from red brick buildings out into the black pitch street. The mid-week point is band night, a gathering of youth and urban rock elders. In it’s last hour, the sun hangs around to watch the people play. Here too, everything is structure and cars, business and traffic.
A tangled weave of legs and bicycle fenders blocks the sidewalk outside the Red Square creperie, a single obstacle on the short pathway that sits across from the Rite-Aid and siren flashing bum patrol police paddy wagon. Over the pavement stretches long legs, sand toned and sun marked. The barest legs are hairless and all eight of the interwoven feet bend at the toe, minutely dancing in their brown sandals. There are four of them, evenly divided as two boys and two girls, a quadruplet of youth in dress and smile, sitting by their pastel colored bicycles-- Schwinns of course, nothing else would be fitting--and the people passing by wonder,
How old are they? Twenty something? Oh highschoolers, wait no, must be at least twenty. They always guess twenty, but never ask, never talk to them even though the youth themselves seem to have conversation.