A Hot July In the Texas Hill Country

Across the valley, salted with the distant sands of the Sahara, I hear the raucous song of summer’s cicadas. As a counterpoint, dry Texas mesquite trees offer a sullen crack like old men requiring their Club Soda with lemon to clear their throat, burning with age. The sun, so often serenaded for its pink bloom of morning, it’s golden orb at noon and fiery red at sunset, today, in mid-July, does not move. My shadow, so reliably robust by late afternoon, deeply engraved on the stones and grasses of the Hill country, is so pale in this terrible light, that I begin to doubt my existence. And what if that existence was in doubt? A wasp looping, dipping in a slim glaze of water Brown leaves hanging loosely from branches like the hot tongues of ranch dogs. Lone Star flags rustle on their poles. Lemonade glasses perspire. The wasp in the birdbath loops, dips, sips and dies.