spreads out. It reaches down like the giant hand of some monster. The buildings burn.
The air is saturated with the hot sun, thick with it. The air
is a fog of fire and steam. The lungs burn and sweat. The skin
drowns in its own boiling water, erupting. The air lies still,
layers of itself, all in place like the bodies filed in a morgue,
corpses grotesquely shelved. Somewhere corpses and rot hang
in the air, an old smell in the old air, the air that has never
moved off these city streets, the air that has been waiting
through the killer winter to burn, to torment, to smother: to
burn: the air that has been there year after year, never moving,
but burning more and more summer after summer, aged air,
old smell: immortal, while humans die.
There is never any wind. There is never a cool breeze. The sun
absorbs the wind. The cement absorbs the wind. The wind
evaporates between earth and sky. There is never any air to
breathe. There is only heat. Rain disappears in the heat, making
the air hotter. Rain hangs in the air, in the thick, hot air: bullets
of wet heat stopped in motion. Rain gets hot: water boiled that
37
never cools. Rain becomes steam, hanging in midair: it burns
inside the nose, singes the hairs in the nose, scorches the throat:
leaves scars on the skin. The air gets wetter and hotter and when
the rain stops the air is heavier, thicker, harder to breathe. Rain
refreshes only the smell, giving it wings.
The smell is blood on piss. The blood coagulates on the
cement, then rots. Knives cut and figures track through the
blood making burgundy and scarlet footprints. Cats lap up its
edges. It never gets scrubbed out. The rain does not wash it
away. Dust mixes in with it. Garbage floats on top of it. Candy
bar wrappers get stuck in it. Empty, broken hypodermic
needles float. It is a sickening smell, fouling up the street,
twisting the stomach into knots of despair and revulsion: still,
the blood stays there: old blood followed by new: knives especially: sometimes the sharp shots of gunfire: sometimes the exploding shots of gunfire: the acrid smoke hanging above the
blood: sometimes the body is there, smeared, alone, red seeping
out or bubbling or spurting: sometimes the body is there, the
blood comes out hissing with steam, you can see the steam just
above the blood running with it, the blood is hot, it hits the
pavement, it hisses, hot on hot: sometimes the person moves,
walks, runs, staggers, crawls, the blood trailing behind: it stains
the cement: flies dance on it in a horrible, pulsating mass: it
coagulates: it rots: it stinks: the smell gets old and never dies.
Sometimes the next day or the day after people walk through
it and track it around step after step until it is just a faint
splash of faded, eerie pink: and the smell is on their shoes and
they go home: it gets inside, thrown near a pile of clothes or
under the bed: it clings to the floor, crawls along it, vile and
faint.
