With Summer comes

It was hard to decide whether to stay or go at the end of my contract last year.  In the days after I made my decision it was this time of the year that I thought of, the Summer days.  The beautiful, cloudless, endless, humiliating, shirt-pooling summer days.  They're here again.

Between one and two in the afternoon when it crests at thirty-something degrees and holds itself there with near complete humidity it is difficult to be.  My shorts soak through under me at my desk.  In the classroom I weave and steal things from the children to try and keep my brain occupied instead of sludging down the back of my neck and away.  I do not begrudge them their head down, sweat staining my handout about how to give advice.  Here is some advice kids: fake a tumor until the Fall.  Nothing will be taught except how to pit-stain.

At 7pm when soccer begins tonight it's barely broken.  After a half hour of running my body wants to quit so badly that it feels as though I'm having to will my bladder to hold itself.  This is entirely expected.  It was the same last Summer. 

The heat is only beginning.  A barely intrepid thirty-one today but we'll see forty* sure enough.  My icecream habit puts children through college and me on a fast track to diabetes. And with the heat comes the bugs.  What does the small moth watch me approach, allow me within nearly an inch before perhaps deciding to flutter away without any hint of need, while the Mosquito darts and hides in my apartment with a guerilla instinct that would shame the Viet Cong?  It is because we are at war with the Mosquito, and they have never known another Summer.  Each one was bred* only to win this single season.  To steal my sleep and force me to see the room go bright while the buzz my ears.  I hate them and when I kill one in the last part of what should be my night's sleep, I curse them and their mothers and their fathers and their sisters who will come after them with my voice and not quietly.  I leave their bodies in the wall and in the cieling, little notes that are never read by my enemies.  Then I go back to bed and fall a-sweat.

*denoting edits by some asshole I know.