Another endless summer. Stagnant air in our lungs for months force out the same words over and over: I can’t take this any more. The nights offer no respite. Every morning we wake to the same day as the one before. Trees stand gravely still, leaves burn in the relentless sun, the matchstick grass waits to be struck and set our homes ablaze. I offer water to the dusty birds in a city that smells like it’s dying, and I cry every once in a while to salt the parched earth so that no one will settle here again.
Not in the shower, not in the winter, not when we’re dead, I am told, by the moaning swamp ghosts, too miserable to shuffle off this horrible soil.
The living moan, too: ruined clothes, weird hair, butt sweat, breathing soup, irrational anger at car parts, two-minute sunburns, boiled feet.
We smell vibrant, verdant, like rain and moss. Armpit greenhouses grow thick petals. At night we sink into our sweat beds, soak in the humid air that keeps us fertile.
Richard Fierro at his home on Monday. Photo by Daniel Brenner for The New York Times
Freedom isn’t free, but freedom ain’t what it used to be. To enjoy it, you need a history of threats, to know them bone-deep, how to disorient, how to fight to the death. You fought for peace? There will never be peace again. Not when the war is everywhere — every school, every stage, every safe place. It seeps into your blood. You are never the same. But at least you’re trained for the next one.
Mr. Fierro was trying to get better at going out. In Iraq and Afghanistan he’d been shot at, seen roadside bombs shred trucks in his platoon, and lost friends. He was twice awarded the Bronze Star.
The wars were both past and still present. There were things he would never forget. For a long time after coming home, crowds put him on edge. He couldn’t help to be vigilant. In restaurants he sat against the wall, facing the door. No matter how much he tried to relax, part of him was always ready for an attack, like an itch that could not be scratched.
I’m alone in this hot attic, panicking. I’m alone in the sea as it gathers around me. I’m alone as my mind parts from my body. I’m alone as I watch my husband gather me. I’m alone as I hold my dog to my cheek. I’m alone as I carry her to safety. I’m alone fearing my next heartbeat. I’m alone in this land as it melts in the heat.
— I cried when I read Chloe’s story, below, and saw the picture. It reminded me of too many things from Harvey, which was five years ago this month.
Chloe Adams woke up about 5 a.m. Thursday to gurgling noises coming from the drain in her bathroom and suddenly found herself screaming for help in the dark as rains flooded her Eastern Kentucky home.
“All I knew was that I only had two options here,” said the 17-year-old, who was alone with her dog Sandy. “We stay inside and drown or I take my chances swimming to safety. I knew the dangers of trying to swim in deep and moving water, but I felt I had no choice.”
Acting on adrenaline, she swam to the top of a neighbor’s garage building. She pushed Sandy’s container ahead of her against the current, then swam. She pushed again. Then swam.
“I’m alone in this,” she thought. “If we’re going to survive this, I’m going to have to make that happen.”
I have no special skills, no magic to impart. I am not a man with unimpeachable parts. I am a woman in Texas my flag upside-down. I am screaming and screaming WHAT. NOW.
One month in a long line I’m lucky to be half-done I think I’ll be lucky to survive another one burning on the sidewalk no rain for weeks my legs splayed and chapped crying for relief.
Leave me for dead now leave me for dead leave me I am screaming leave me I am dead on the fourth of July in the year of our dread.
Desire is a drive to a fast dead-end. Sex is an act that should never happen. I was a kid and dad saw me shakin Go on then and do it, there’s no sense in waitin.
Was it a sin? Was it a signature? What am I now that I am a father? What is she now that she is my daughter? Just another whore, a cow for the slaughter.
Painting: ‘Youth Mourning’ by Sir George Clausen, 1916
For three days, I felt him move. I named him Fox, for one of the lost boys. They tried to keep him in, but I was unable. Which isn’t to say that I didn’t want to. I wanted to hold him forever. I could have. This isn’t one of those things they let you do. I tried to hold him, I wanted to. It wasn’t meant to be. I’ve had some time to think about it. I won’t be able to do anything else.
Twenty weeks. It’s a seemingly arbitrary measure that recently shattered the lives of Daniel and Taylor Mahaffey as the Austin couple was happily preparing for the birth of a son.
Late on a Wednesday, Taylor Mahaffey, 23 — who had been previously diagnosed with a condition known as incompetent cervix — felt something was off. Having suffered through a miscarriage during a previous pregnancy, the couple rushed to St. David’s North Austin Medical Center only to discover that Taylor’s cervix had prematurely dilated and their son’s legs were already emerging.
Hospital doctors attempted several emergency procedures to keep the developing baby inside the womb, said Daniel Mahaffey, 29. But nothing worked.
“We just wanted him out,” Mahaffey said. “We didn’t want him to suffer.”
But the couple ran into the state’s ban on abortions at or after 20 weeks of gestation, included in strict anti-abortion legislation known as House Bill 2 passed by state lawmakers in 2013. Because the baby and mother were technically healthy, doctors told the Mahaffeys they could not induce labor even though their son would not survive out of the womb.
An epidemic of angry men — their hot breaths melting our final winters — report daily to their small boxes to vent.
Hot rage, white.
Wearing paranoia like house dresses — furfuraceous bodies throbbing underneath — their duty to their country to point and make points from their gray cells, to “well, actually” themselves deep into the ground, to harass birds for bothering to sing in the morning.
The only cure: a mother to bend their molten limbs around cool, steel braces, to say: “I didn’t create you to lose you to the dark like this.”
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