The sun outside my door sits in seeming solitude…brightly warming the grass and concrete for nobody else for nothing else than the space within the three cinderblock walls.
Or so it seems.
Or so I want it to be.
Only for me and the dogs who sit lazing on the grass then on the concrete alternating between available shade and the standing still sunshine. They pant in the sun and loll their tongues in the shade, legs splayed out behind them. I want to lay beside them and do the same. The whole setting calls to me to do this and the part of me that remembers sunny still fortresses made only for myself does too.
A song made up of birds’ voices and a floating buzz of leaf blower punch criss-cross holes through the beaming sunlight that stands like a lone tower from the square footage of lawn and concrete. It stretches up farther than I can see it. Transparent and welcoming. The dogs lie within it. I’m still outside of it. Admiring.
Mentally pushing and pulling my back gets shoved my wrists twisted stupidly ashamed and shamed at the logic and reason applied to a spontaneous wanting and impulse straining to be heard. I fuck that logic and take four steps down where I lie on the concrete. Back against the heated hardness. Inside the lone tower made just for me and the dogs. Punched through with the sound of birds and faint leaf blowers. A summery spring day and the sun blinds my closed eyes. The dogs attack my face with dry gummy tongues, excitedly stepping on my strewn hair before settling down alongside me like chubby boats alongside a human dock. I lay still until some part of me is satiated and the tower opens up and becomes the sky and world around me. Until it is no longer just my tower and I have won all sides of me and it (or it has won me). It spreads out like a friendly mushroom cloud and visits everyone who is like me and they absorb my peace and breathe it in until they smell the summery spring day and my three cinderblock walls and the panting of my dogs and the concession of all reasoning and the hot hardness on my back.
It is everyone’s on this day after it was mine.
xTx has been published in Thieves Jargon, Cherry Bleeds, Dogzplot, Zygote, and is upcoming in decomP, Robot Melon and Bull. She lives in Southern California but misses San Francisco. E-mail her at notimetosayit at gmail dot com.