22 JUL 25
Yali is busy detailing a Minecraft tutorial for me early that morning before the thermometer starts climbing on the other side of the brick...
Bus Patience out to the Big House through a haze of heat settled silent over low green hills...
Back home Puck is in the yard... samurai sweatband and shades against the brutal elements as he runs sprints and drags fifty pound weights through the grass... calls “uncle” as the heat index reaches 102 before eleven o'clock... “I could keep going...” he pants through a jug of water... but for what good?...
Gather Patience at one o'clock with a paper bag of homemade oatmeal cranberry cookies... byproducts of babysitting when it's too hot to crack into the outdoors...
Heavy cities of cloud in the sky... zooming back through the Creve Coeur valley into St. Louis County...
Yali is fully clothed in a long-sleeved shirt over another shirt over pants and shoes and socks in the carport allowing a waterfall from the garden hose to soak him scalp to ground... big happy smile... heat index is at 112 now...
Meanwhile Patience pauses another hour of dance practice in the living room in front of her transportable floor-length mirror to watch Puck... because Puck is always doing something interesting...
This time he's found an unmarked spray bottle of some unknown contents (probably rubbing alcohol) in the linen closet and is preparing to add ingredients... “Do you think this will keep the leeches off me if I add table salt and hydrogen peroxide?” // “Uh... probably...” // he dumps the rest of the salt jar and a lot of hydrogen peroxide into the bottle then pulls out a Sharpie and hands it to me... “Can you write 'Leech Repellant' on this?” // then Patience sees her opportunity... “I'm going to draw a BUTT on it!” she declares and runs off with both bottle and Sharpie... “Get back here with that!” Puck bellows... but it's too late... she's locked herself in the bathroom to Martin Luther that bottle... Puck then momentarily forgets about this annoyance while searching for water shoes on Amazon... some time later Patience returns with the bottle... “Did you draw a butt on the bottle?” // “I drew LOTS of BUTTS!”... on this fantastically eloquent note of interaction...
...it's almost time for Puck to get back to Produce... but not before he sprays “leech poison” into Patience's half-drunk Waterloo sparkling water... “Drink that” he grins evilly at her... she ignores this and begins to play a game with him that could probably be called “I'm going to ask you a question about yourself and then I have to guess the answer and then I'm going to ask myself the same question about myself and then you have to guess the answer” over and over and over again... which lasts long enough that she joins me in delivering him to work so she can continue the game on the two-and-a-half minute drive to the drop point...
Return to sit at the patio table with Yali listening to the sky... thunder crackle and cicada... raindrops in sweet clover...
“What's in this can of sparkling water?” Oxbear asks at the door // “Uh... lots of stuff... did you drink some of it?” // “Yes” // get busy texting Puck about how much leech poison he actually sprayed into the can... while he texts back-and-forth pushing me to drive Oxbear to the hospital...
...Yali is in the bathroom carefully inking red face paint onto various parts of his body to act out “wounded Spiderman” and cutting holes in his old Spiderman costume while it's on his body...
...and chicken strips are going into the oven before Patience has to get back to the studio...
Gold towers in the sky... brush of rainbow... some woman angry-yelling down by the Metrolink tracks...
...and Oxbear does not die from leech poisoning...