100 Words: Heavy solstice

Heavy solstice warmth, air too close to the skin, parading residential streets, pausing in front of a mysterious American-flag bedecked house, the flag monochrome to a degree that almost overwhelmed the actual colors of the scene. A kind of distress signal, a mark of colors that have run. Downtown people sit leadenly at tables outside restaurants that have decided a strip of sidewalk can be a patio. Interiors are inaccessible, secret, nondescript and indescribable—we live in private or nakedly but the public as we’ve known it has disappeared. Robins and squirrels in the backyard trade places, exchanging verticals, perspectives, cries.