no trigger warnings

words: 561

notes: i was thinking about a song called Peaches For Me and I can't remember who it's by but it's literally a song about having a fuckton of peaches. and then thinking about summers growing up. this was born.

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you are 14 and on the edge of puberty when your father takes you right on through the bible belt and into the deep south. it's a hunt in Georgia and he leaves you and your brother in a trailer on someone else's property with a promise to be back at the end of the month. a promise you know he won't keep, so you make it a little more homey in your room in that double wide. it's hardly air conditioned and everything leaks through the windows, but you don't have to listen to people have sex all hours of the day, so it's definitely worth it. all that there is out here is cicadas and your brother's tone deaf singing, rock classics that lull you to sleep better than anything.

the state itself is made of melting peach popsicles and thighs sticking to the leather seats heat. it's all shirts clinging tightly to skin and denim that's weighted like it's wet. the sun beats down and it's like they're in a bowl of soup in the microwave, except everything smells like overripe peaches and lakewater instead of chicken and rosemary. stops by the ice cream shop make you feel sloshy and cold, so you jump in the pond outside the trailer. the water is thick and you float so easy, catfish nipping at your toes. your brother suggests you catch and keep them, but neither of you know how to skin a fish and you're glad for the millionth time that you turned down that electric blue nail polish from Minnesota as you cut your fingers on the scales and paring knife.

the whole place feels heavy, and you realize that's why things move so slow around here. gravity has doubled on you and the air is a sludge inside and out. the pieces of you glue together with sweat and grime and remind you of all the places that touch. the peaches and the fish and the ice cream aren't for you, they're for kids who live here and the kids who escape here with relatives and feel more trapped than anything. so look away and take walks through tall grass that gets you covered in what locals keep calling chiggers, but you think it's just bug bites. who knows, not you.

by the time your father is back, the days have started shortening and you've seen the sky alight with stars and fire alike, the lake has been explored and used and abused with all the algae stirred up, and the grass has a little path from your restlessness. the molasses of this land has seeped into your bones, under your skin, and you try not to think about how you could pretend the moist heat was arms around you if you tried really hard. your father doesn't like waiting, doesn't like how lazy and loose limbed you and your brother are but he wasn't there, he didn't melt in the Georgia sun like popsicles on the porch. You try not to remember it all as you beat feet, eat pavement, and shred roads all the way to Colorado and the weightlessness returns. you try to forget bandaged fingers picking apart tender meat and cradling tender peaches left under the tree too long, the warmth seeped into the cracks of your soul as the mountain air dries you back out. so you cradle a peach pit and tell yourself that it's alright, that land wasn't made for you. no land is made for you, only the fingerprints behind.

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notes: STORYTIME: when I was a kid I would play in the grass a lot, especially around twilight during the summers because that was the best time of day and I would come in COVERED in itchy bumps and everyone told me it was "chiggers" and I didn't believe them because my dad is kind of obsessive over having a PERFECT yard, so he sprays for those things. this continued until one night I was rolling down a hill covered in bluegrass and spent the evening covered in hives. there were no motherfucking chiggers I was allergic to grass. I'm still salty that no one believed me.

anywho, comments? critiques? stories about summer?

thanks for reading luvs 💙