Free The Summer That Melted Everything by Tiffany McDaniel Page B

of the pajama pants I’d been wearing for the past few days, along with the T-shirt stained from canned spaghetti. I brushed my teeth, showered, and trimmed my hair and beard. Hell, I even bothered with deodorant. I figured time travel would be sweaty.
    While I was putting on my tennis shoes, laced but not tied with Grand’s old shoelaces, I heard the shattering from outside. When I got out there, I saw the neighbor boy standing by shards of glass on the ground. He had a baseball in his hand. The one he throws to his dog.
    â€œI didn’t mean to break your winda.” He hid his eyes under his ball cap. “I’m awful sorry, Mr. Bliss.”
    The ball had shattered the top pane. It was my foot and tennis shoe that shattered the bottom one. The anger came, and a kick was the least I could do.
    Over two years have gone by, and the boy still apologizes every time he sees me. I know it wasn’t a time machine. And yet, when I later crawled through the gaping hole of the gone window, there was a brief moment in crossing the sill I almost believed I would come out the other side to a neon light and in that I could save everything.
    I had yet to know what having Sal in our lives would mean, so that first night me and him spent together in my room, I was excited to have him, though I was hot as hell as I kicked the blankets off to the floor and fell back, sweating on the sheets.
    Sal was lying in the large window bed, lined with cushions and pillows, where I would sleep myself during past summers when it was especially hot because I could press my face against the cold glass of the pane. I told Sal he could do the same, but he seemed at peace with the heat, lying with his blanket up to his chin and choosing a pair of my pajamas that were long sleeved. Mom had tossed his overalls in the washer after dinner, not saying anything about their stale urine smell. She told me to share my clothes with him. It would be a while before I saw him in those overalls again.
    â€œThis heat is humongous.” I kicked the air. “How we gonna sleep?”
    I reached over to my bedside table and turned the fan on high, directing it so it’d blow on my face as I lay there with my arms folded behind my head, staring up at the ceiling, which was painted as the jungle top canopy of the Amazon rainforest.
    My bedroom was Brazil, and in it an anaconda coiled around a branch, scarlet macaws were painted in flight on the walls, and leaf frogs were carved on my bedposts. Mom had made her Brazil more Amazon than anything else, though there was a little Rio de Janeiro on my double closet doors that when closed formed two halves of Christ the Redeemer.
    â€œFielding?” Sal spoke over the hum of the fan.
    â€œYeah?”
    â€œDo you like Mr. Elohim?”
    â€œYou know what a steeplejack is? It’s where you fell chimneys and build steeples, do things like that. It’s all roof work, is what it is. And he’s teachin’ me the art. He’s a nice guy. Hey, Sal? I’ve been wonderin’. I mean, if you’re the devil, you’ve met God. What’s He look like?”
    â€œWhat do you think He looks like?”
    â€œLike a cotton swab, thin and white with too much hair on His head and too much hair on His feet. Wouldn’t that be funny? A cotton swab? Kind of makes ya think twice ’bout stickin’ a Q-tip up your nose, don’t it? Though, thinkin’ ’bout it now, maybe if we left a swab in our ear, we’d start behavin’ a little differently. Havin’ God inside our ear just might make us all, I don’t know, a little … more.”
    â€œAlso make you a little more deaf with only one ear whose hearing is not sacrificed by a plug of cotton.” He leaned up on his elbow as he asked me to tell him about a day. A day I felt loved.
    I turned in the heat, thinking, but not thinking long.
    â€œJanuary seventh of this year. It was my thirteenth birthday,