Dear AnyOneGirl…

Dear Laura,

Summer is ending.

The sun is slowly uncurling his fist around the city. Hunchback sunflowers with burnt
yellow petals droop their wide old faces to the ground. Sap is hardening in the trees.
Tall buildings are sucking in their bricks and clutching at their windowpanes while
wind whistles through his teeth.

Soon winter will be tearing down the green and clawing through the blue, spitting
grey on our faces and swallowing the sun too early. The air will grow thin and tumble
over and over and over until the soft edges wear down to the shiny sharp core, cutting
through our clothes and burning us cold.

All the beeswax-skinned girls will wrap grey wings around their bodies and flit
around like stiff moths in the freeze. The boys will grow spines of wood. I will store
the sun behind my eyes and they will be chunks of light until the last drop of warmth
has been pressed from the stony sky.

I think about where the river lady will go when winter gets hungry and starts gnawing
on her bones. We see her when we run along the Hudson; wandering like driftwood
with splinters for eyes, looking out at the river like she left something there. When we
run by I can hear water in her heart, and the one time our eyes met I saw a thousand
green glass bottles shatter.

I will remember summer when our skulls were soft and the air was so tight, sewn
together like lovers knuckles locking white; and the days when the sun was a
flame and we melted like wax in the grass, the locusts singing like saw blades,
closer and louder than the soft-hum cicadas back home. Do you remember how
we used to peel cicada skins that clung to tree bark, their shells perfect and empty?

They do that as they grow. Imagine how it must feel to shed your old self in one
piece, to escape wet, new and soft again.

Love,

Amy

Written by Amy Fraser of onislands