The Loop

by Esme Benet

          Amber could feel her Chicago childhood just out of reach, just out there in that damp summer sear. The ambiance of this house, its trapped-in-1940 style and lack of central air recalled her to those hours spent in summers on the porch, watching as twilight became streetlights. Watching twilight disappear as the street lamps slowly hummed to life up and down the long, straight lines of Depression bungalows.

          When she was a child, riding in the back of the yellow Buick, she would watch the streetlights pull the car along, great sweeping beams that would reach and grasp the vehicle, pull it forward, and fling it within reach of the beam streaming from the next lamp.

          She thought about the last time she wet herself as a child, riding in the backseat, waiting and waiting to get home until she just could not hold it.

          Why didn't you say something? Her grandparents had asked, annoyed.

          I dunno, she said. They did not hear what that really meant: I have been so beaten for needing any attention that I was terrified to say.

          She had stared at the 7-11 sign and wept without sound.

          She was still voiceless, laying quietly in her lover's bed, watching out the window and waiting for darkness

          She pushed her hand through her hair. Her lover? The fire had left their loins long ago. Maybe that was why the world was burning. The heat that had been her desire had to be sent somewhere else, had to be flung out into the world lest it burn her to death.

She did not reach for him anymore. He only turned from her, to his dreams.

          Outside, the insects sung, and the world burned.