Summer Heat by Woosuk Kim

​It’s late when the boy and girl finally leave the restaurant, emerging through the swaying framed door. They pause to get the bearings of a summer heat, the febrile wind gushing through a glass slit back into the cafe, the fever eventually evaporating into the seventeen-watt air. They proceed to an area where the borders are impossible to be mapped, granules of sand drifting with every footstep. The sun sketched shadows on beds in the La Paz Sand Dunes.

Before the couple lies a Sirocco storm, where the sultry voweled wind penetrates hearts with the aim of a summer draft through loosely fit cotton shirts - a draft that feels its way past the rusted street lamps and alignment of mango trees, building echelons of humidity on the skeletons of leaves.

There’s a sense of longing carried through tropical breeze, sliding through like the ranks of salted sweat trickling down their bodies. There is a puddle gathering on the street floor, condensation beading the stone tiles. There are dreams and illusions preserved in an isolation where they become indistinguishable to one another, both smoldering in the scald of a desert-like temperature, building onto the Mercury with a constant addition.
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Here are the regions of bodies daubed with sweat, like swimmers in a Jacuzzi. Regions where body heat has vanished like water in an ice bath, where the boy’s breath becomes a vibrating mirage. Dangerous regions, where even after the heat is glaciated by the turn of a dial, love can still be smothered like kids on swings, holding hands as they oscillate through the current.

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Woosuk Kim is a sophomore at the International School of Manila. His writing has been previously recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, and Zoetic Press.