It was a steamy summer day. The humidity was so thick that you’d swear the air was ten percent banana pudding. And another five percent might have been cigarette ash, judging from the layer of grit that dusted our sweaty skin. By the time we had locked up the apartment and set foot on the street, we already felt like we had been camping for days without showers.
I had finished a raspberry Tootsie Roll Pop a few minutes earlier, and the aftertaste of seemingly real raspberries coated the inside of my mouth. It tasted like I was returning from picking fresh berries in a green, leafy patch. Like I had stood there in the sun for hours, sneaking every fifth berry in my mouth and carting the rest of the fragrant, bleeding fruits homeward in a heavy, shallow cardboard box. I could make pie with them, or scones. Instead, I was just heading out into the city on a humid day, a few minutes after finishing a sucker.
As our four slick arms collected their layer of city grime, I rolled my tongue in the berry taste on the roof of my mouth. It’s strange that the raspberry Tootsie Roll Pops taste like real fruit, while the cherry and grape and orange and chocolate always taste like chemical facsimiles. Somehow, Tootsie only got raspberry right.
We left my apartment, which was on the second floor of a building that held three other apartments. The building was made with bluish-green bricks. It had been built before 1900, and now some of the bricks had a tendency to crumble apart. When they crumbled, they looked just like soft, blue tofu.
Sometimes the building had strange problems. Like the doors wouldn’t shut in hot weather because they swelled. There was a leak in the ceiling over the toilet, so sometimes when I was sitting on the can I would feel a drop of rainwater in the part of my hair. Read the rest of this entry »
