dragon’s breath (deborah)
J referred to his laptop as cursed object the other day and I keep thinking about it. Our jobs require us to stay latched to our screens and after a day of eye strain, I no longer want to look at them. It makes me want to get a typewriter. But writing any other way is so slow. My hand cramps at my desk while journaling. So here I am now, typing into the cursed object.
We’re in the middle of a heatwave and we do not have central air. It was 100ºF two days in a row, 94ºF today, one degree cooler tomorrow, which means a solid 80-something indoors. We’ve been lucky this summer; it’s been relatively mild. We haven’t had to retire to the basement. But it’s strange how, in the peak of the day’s heat, the house feels cooler then than it does now, in the evening. I read that it’s poor insulation: over the course of the day, the house steadily absorbs heat, and once it begins to get cooler outside, the house leaks the heat inside instead of out. “It’s hot,” J says to me, after dinner, when the sun has gone down but we are heating up. “It’s hot,” I agree, noticing how the pillows behind me have gathered warmth in their fibers, that the couch fabric underneath me feels like it would glow red with heat vision.
We usually try to keep the living room hermetically sealed by shutting the doors, especially to J’s office, which opens into the backyard. We leave the sliding glass door to the backyard open for Miso’s easy access, so our butlering involves just opening the hallway door. I let her out just now and opened that door. I half-expected a rush of cool air but what greeted me instead was dragon’s breath, the whole room filled with radiant heat.
