Extract
The air lay as heavy as water in the square dark rooms of the farmhouse. The hosue was still, sounds indistinct and muffled, as if heard through cloth. Upstairs, in the boy’s room, the clock over the desk ticked away the minutes just past midnight. In the next room, where the boy’s parents slept, there was the soft rattle of an old fan, moving the thick air from outside the house to inisde and over his parent’s bodies. As they had done nearly every hot night that summer, they had offered the fan to the boy, but the boy, aware that summer for the first time of his parents’ age, had refused to take it from them.
In the house, far from town, Andy slept on his back in his bed. He slept badly, his lips lightly parted, his body smothered by the August night. A damp sheet, losse from its moorings, covered his chest. The boy’s chest was bony then, without the muscles that would come later, and he had an older boy’s summer gorwth, as if he’d sprouted too fats and had lost the grace of childhood. He was tall now, so tall that he towered over parents,a nd his unfamiliar limbs, splayed out under and out from the sheet, gave his body a lanky awkwardness, even in his sleep. His skin had an August tan and had all but lost the marks of adolescence. His hair, drak brown and thick and slightly too long, against his father’s wishes, was wet at the sides and the back with the heat. He turned, pulling the sheet with him, as if to say, despite his dreams, Ok, now, enough of this.
The boy’s father, in the next room, sleeping on his stomach in a sleeveless undershirt and boxer shorts, moved a hand near his ear to make a mosquito go away. His mother lay beside his father, on her back, like the boy. She had thrown off the sheet entirely. But her body was clothed in her pink summer pajamas. She had curlers at the sides and on top of her head. The mosquito, discouraged by the father, alighted on her thigh, and too late, in her sleep, she moved her led against the air.