Throwback Thursday: ‘Dead of Summer’

The dead move beneath her window. She watches them three floors below, floating through circles of streetlamp glow like a school of tiny fish flitting just underneath the water’s surface. Clearly boys, their sneakers, jeans, t-shirts. Shaved heads and curved skulls. Hungry, predatory gazes. 

Her ghost stories. 

They yell and moan, twitch and dance. They swing their arms in violent circles and make loud, grinding noises, which she guesses to be the frustrated gnashing of their teeth, since they are all souls of young men taken before their time. 

The other residents of the building, blue-haired, blue-veined, white-dentured old women, hate the ghosts, cursing their very presence. They scream at them and pour pots of scalding hot water down onto the plaza below. Scare tactics. But their balms and creams stink with the fear of the grim reaper, so it stands to reason they want to keep the stillness from their lungs, hearts, bones — if only for a little while longer. 

Really, they have more in common than they think. 

The boys, dead, haunt the streets that once gave them life. The women, left behind by their men, haunt the hallways and lounges of the seniors’ home, counting out their remaining days in perms, foot baths, and petty gossip.

Sunset Estates Retirement Home: six stories of concrete and age spots built smack dab in the middle of the city. Each unit, a starter casket. Learn to use less, live small, take tiny steps. Be gracious and polite, tick down like a timepiece left purposefully unwound. Perhaps not the worst way to die, but not how she once imagined it. Amelia Earhart, that’s the way to go. On an adventure, eyes afire, chin up, vanish, leave a pretty memory. 

Girl, never waste away slowly in plain view.