Leftovers from a summer. Runner-Up in The Summer That Wasn’t Challenge.
The summer was supposed to taste like mango juice on sticky fingers, like pool water scrubbing off all the bullshit we’d been carrying all year. It was supposed to feel like a reset. But it never showed up like that. Instead it crawled in through the dog’s infected ear canal, pulsing with pus and heat and that sour, dirt-brown stench of something festering behind a door no one opens anymore.
