Her eyes were quiet and angry as they sucked in the sheen and quivered under a layer of fresh tears that sparkled like sun on water. Her silver glittered skin glistened against the light-spin of a sunbeam falling through the ceiling fan in between rotations of four polished white blades.
The city pulsed inside the womb of the universe, stretching its limbs against the membrane of heat that blistered and bubbled its streets. She opened the window and listened to her voice ripple across a heat wave in the dead summer air. There was no one there to grasp it as it evaporated in an unforgiving moment of loneliness.

The world was on a string, like a yo-yo, gliding up and down her inability to stabilize her thoughts. She knew he loved her. He loved her far above the mountains, well beyond the stars that brushed the purple sky, deeper than an ocean that was endless in its waters.

But Baltimore was humid. And her mind still grasped the thoughts of love from many years beforehand. He had written poetry across her leg in Pennsylvania, made love to her in Maryland as the rain fell through an open window, and cooked dinner for her inside a house with a shrine built for Morrissey and Japanese lanterns that hung in paper balls above them. Pink paper balls.

He died in same blue car they shared once for a week, on trip back from D.C. in late summer. She still had the yellow flowered book she held on her knee, filled full with memories of bright orange sunsets and a life that was lost somewhere in Utah.

No, Baltimore was humid.

And she was scared of jellyfish.