Deleting Kisses

between shadows and white light

July 13, 2026. 8:35 p.m.

The South in July is heavy with wet heat and pressure, not a violent pressure but a hydraulic kind, fueled by rain, salt, mildew, and an infinitely stifling delay. Twisted and taut inside it, the only wind is man-made, kicked up by the momentum of passing cars. I keep finding myself caught in the kind of towns where screams close by should be interpreted as neither sex nor death, because the chances of either happening at any given moment are even. This is Broward County, the last inhabited stretch before the Everglades, where the red glow on a gate arm flickers in a panting mechanical pulse and then dies. It is an evanescent, provincial borderland where the darkness seems to suck light inward leaving only a few objects to shine with the morbid, luminous clarity of an X-ray. A wet curb flashes. A mailbox reflector winks. A cracked taillight of a parked car grins. Suburbia closes around me from every side, each house half-swallowed by blackened green swamp.

Tonight the sun has set and the moon is nowhere to be found, and every airplane cutting across the skyline appears frantic with direction, torn between two competing airports. The last blue of the sky collapses onto the concrete, draining the roads and the homes of dimension until everything looks blanketed, grey, and abandoned. Beneath it, in the hypnotic liquidity of the summer aerosphere, heat lightning cracks soundlessly behind the clouds and every movement below slows into choreography. The power lines hang black and dripping, as though lifted from some chemical bath, and for a moment the only distinction between the living and the dead is that the living are still moving. Just barely.

I was headed farther south along the yellow paint dividing a two-lane road, turning every six seconds to watch traffic pour off the interstate and rush toward me. The headlights flickered, then twinkled, then opened into a hard white beam, as though something had come to remove me from reality. As though reality itself had finally decided to pursue me. I ran, but the light kept gaining, bright enough to erase the road, the houses, even the outline of my own body. It nearly suffocated me, just as the shadows had, before I turned the corner.

The girl who lived here is fine, but she is gone. I am alone with Atlantic Avenue in the abstract, Pacific distances, and the smell of danger lifting slowly from the road. I’ll be gone by the end of the week. By the time I return, I’ll be twenty-three and it may never be July here again. I am running out of time to tell this town who I am, but sex and death follow close behind me wherever I go.