The Penultimate Tree

Scorching when he crosses the street. Scorching when he leaves his room. Scorching too when he notices that the painted lines dividing the boulevard's two lanes are melting. Now he understands better why people laughed when he said he was about to spend summer in Austin.

The city is emptying of all those students that have choked it with their hue-and-cry for eight months and the heat is asserting itself and flattening everything, a heat that decomposes people, makes them part of a vapor that smells of putrefaction, of the fetid scent emanating from the mouth of a dry storm. […]