We had a fire drill today, and it was unreasonably hot. It is September, the second day of autumn, and we had a fire drill and walked out of the cool building single-file and silent into the sun.
Heat, everywhere. Heat reflecting from the white walls, rising from the blacktop, crackling in the sibilant lisp of seven hundred pairs of feet scuffling through the desiccate grass. Heat in our eyes and hair and trickling down our backs, heat stifling the otherwise incorrigible well of words that bubbles the adolescent soul.
We stood for minutes that were broad as well as long, broad as the desert and the faraway plains. And when the word was exchanged and the dismissal given, there was quiet in our return: the quiet of those relieved to be released, for a moment, from words; separate, and silent, and united by fire.
ethelweard 