In July, in the heat of the city, the hot air rises, up out of the steam stacks, out of the manholes where there are no men, the vapor bubbling till it cannot hold any more, before it breaks, cracks the lid and shoots out, like breath from a dolphin’s spout, into the streets, under the feet, hot fog under the feet of sleepy passersby. Women in purple satin pants and men in blocky shoes, children having waltzed out of college dormitories to weave down sidewalks, to think in clouds, all carousel over the thin layer of fog that trickles under their feet.
In the night, the wood that makes up the city’s homes—the planks, the floorboards of apartment units, stacked ten, twenty, twenty-five high—pops, creaks, expands in the heat. A sigh, and the wood loosens. Its fibers swell with perspiration, water condensed from the vapors of the city, dripped down, slipped into the splices where one wooden plank meets another. Overhead, over my head, the grains spread apart, the fibers—warmed with condensation—bulge into each other, and the hot gases seep in. The apartments open, pushing up against their walls, the last board on the floor stretching out as far as it can go, into the wall’s plaster. Sigh, and the boards expand, and only the corners of the walls hold them, just barely, in.
Sometimes, the floors expand so much that a streak of wood, having been squeezed so hard from either side, pops right up out of the board, like a zit held in for too long. The splinter perks up out of the plank, with a click so soft that one would only hear it if they put their ear to the ground, in the night. And the rest of the wood breathes and fills the splinter’s gap. The critters, the small ones that live in the boards of the floor—the bugs, sometimes with paper wings folded over their tops, sometimes with no wings, just a series of spindly legs bending out of their undersides, the mice, if there are any mice, baby mice with naked tails, sucking on their mothers—breathe with the floor. When it sighs, and expands, as it does in the heat of the city, they too exhale, move their legs back and forth, bend their knees if they have any knees at all, their bodies filling, their babies sucking down on more milk.
Do the apartments in the city get bigger in July? I wonder. Do they grow, in the heat of the summer? I hear, as I lay awake between dreams, the floorboards inching up against the plaster. The plaster, having nowhere else to go, must, by the smallest of margins, creep into the sidewalks, lean out of its core, inch into the seams of the concrete where there once walked another man’s blocky shoes and another woman’s satin pants.
Image: Steam near Times Square, New York City. Photo by Andromeda2064, 2020. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Does the rest of the wood observe the perking up of the splinter with irritation or with a sense gratitude for providing a long overdue opportunity to expand to its full potential?