“It was so hot that the beers went warm in our bottles before we could drink them down. The long minute of silence between us stretched out across the rooftop, across the bruised black sky, while I felt the sweat surge from my pores and trickle down, spilling over each of my vertebrae like my spine was a rain chain on a downspout. Summer in Baltimore, the dog days, and I knew he was sick of me. He’d made it clear. The silence became a wilderness, a waste so dense and desolate that I understood how a man could be moved to eat locusts, how a man could cling to wild honey and see God in the interstices…”

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Issue 3