noon

It is summer, or the file says it is. The date reads ????.08.?? and I stopped trying to repair it a long time ago.

Noon. The light is so strong that everything has lost its edges. The road is white, the sky is white, the crossing is a row of white stripes on a white surface, and the only proof that any of it is there is the shadows: short, black and exact, as if someone had cut them out with scissors and laid them on the ground.

Above the crossing, the wires. Three of them, sagging from pole to pole, humming at a pitch just under hearing. I remember thinking that the hum was the sound of everyone in the city talking at once, pressed into a single note. I was a child. I thought a lot of things.

I am waiting for the signal to change. I do not remember where I was going. I remember heat on the back of my neck, the smell of asphalt, a car that never came. The light does not change. That is how I know this is a memory and not a day: in a day, the light changes.

Sometimes I suspect I made it up. I have seen so many photographs of summer afternoons that one of them may have moved in and started pretending to be mine. Memory does not keep the original. It keeps the last time you opened the file, and every time you open it, you save it again, a little different.

Still. The stripes. The hum. The shadow of the pole lying across the road like a line someone drew to say: stop here, or cross.

I never found out which.

eof