Whistler's Dam

A Modified Dream

      Peter pressed his palm deeply across his forehead, as Sarah laid pretzel-shaped beside him. The thin cotton throw washed over onto the shag flooring. Her eyes jittering like bingo balls. He focused onto a faux candle in an attempt join her in hypnotic erasure, but the forever summer has singed everything, even far past nightfall the nutcracker clock is greased with sweat and every fifteen minutes the hammer falls.

      Impulsively, Peter quietly slipped off the bed and out onto a street hemmed in with modest paint-curled residences wearing nothing, but his bathrobe and a mood ring. He walked to the end of the block, picked up a crowned bottle cap and tentatively flicked it against the lead window with the red race car on it. A spy light flashed electric. A sash cracked. “Celon” Peter S'ed out in a snake-like sibilance “Couldn't S-l-e-e-p”

“Neither could I, the H-”

      Peter waved her down “I know, the heat,” They drifted in the great shadows of tall hills where the air folds hot over cold, descending dozens of meters toward Whistler's Dam to the old crossing, now crumbling crete footings where a trolley bridge once stood. The water that remained, finger deep, was relatively cool, enough for the porous slabs to drink and on them they laid like corpses ready to be lowered into starwash. They held hands for as long as they could.