Heat That Smells Like Drowning, How a ’75 Dodge Bled Auroras on the Asphalt, Three Dedications

by B. Luke Wilson

mezzotint by M. Rapine, curtesy of The Public Domain Review

Heat That Smells Like Drowning 

I drew a perfect tesseract on my son’s old Etch-A-Sketch seconds before the bomb fell. Nobody ever saw it, or how beautiful the shape was. The tremors began light as the air under the muscles of a dancer—and grew until their shaking dissolved my perfect symmetry into the toy’s memoryless sands. Everything flashed to red, and the heat smelled like drowning.

My wife Sarah was a master locksmith. For thirty years she said she could open anything. She waited until the day before she died to tell me she had never loved me. I was staring out over the beaches of Punta Cana when the bomb fell. I’d just finished making my perfect tesseract. All around me the white sands caramelized to crème brûlée, and the heat smelled like drowning.

Sarah bought a blacksmithing forge six months after little David passed away. She placed it in the sandy-floored shed behind our house. David’s Etch-A-Sketch lives there—on a shelf just beyond the melting. It had been his favorite toy, but he’d barely used it. Sarah spends her time forging antique keys. She says she can open anything. Her open hearth makes a red heat, and the heat smells like drowning.

How a ’75 Dodge Bled Auroras on the Asphalt

The narthex of our old church was stained always in damp blue light & the color 
was sanctuary over pale marble walls rivered with thirsty azure veins & deltas
& inside the marble’s mineral iridescence I saw hundreds of soap-bubble skins
& nacre mother-of-pearl & I remembered the spilled hues of truck coolant dying 
on the pavement & God—how that asphalt prism begged for an undressed universe 
to brush with effuse mercurial effulgence & then I was on my old street again 
& the neighborhood rose like yeast into a childhood when I thought the spring 
air always felt stretched wider & in the summer the heat smelled like drowning

Three Dedications 

To the wolf who dug a gulch in my chest the color of plum sorbet & kept digging until it was bone dry & I said a word the only I could find. To the three-year-old boy singing the worst word he knows over & over & over his head his mother’s eyes beg how he isn’t really like this & wherever he learned that word it certainly wasn’t at home. To the girl in love for the first time & blind as a numb hand feeling across a dark room & she is trying to find a book they can both open and read like braille & no other word would come

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