Texas’s Season in Hell
The entire country seems to be swept up in the smothering heat of a long, blinding, burning Texas summer. It isn’t so much the climate—though it is that, too, and I have spent hours half-asleep reflecting on the fact that one day, should the slow creep of equatorial heat continue, everyone will eventually index the world to the same catalog of images I did growing up: dead earthworms baking on the sidewalk, melted asphalt clinging to rubber-soled sneakers, caution tape draped over schoolyard playgrounds with signs warning of second-degree burns.
Inevitably, all of, violent crime is , and wildfires spark in dry western grass. It is a tense, precarious season, and it always seems to build inevitably toward a catharsis that doesn’t arrive. The heat fades so slowly, you never really forget it, and by the time it comes again, it’s like it never retreated. Time stagnates. It’s a peculiar feeling I’ve always thought of as a by-product of repetition—18 summers squinting into the sun by day, sweating in the dark by night, waiting for a reprieve with one half of a permanent headache—that would try anyone. Now it’s trying everyone.
