We sit together on the back-porch steps. We face the backyard which gapes wide open in the dark; the sound that comes from its mouth is nothing but crickets. It is beginning to get cold and you say to me:

“I guess summer really is over.”

Crickets. My stomach hurts and I’m thinking of going back inside soon. I would have gone in several minutes ago, but the moment felt special. I didn’t want to be rude, just leaving like that. Not rude to you, but to everything else.

I am wearing a summer shirt and flip flops. You feed the yard’s big dark mouth by tossing a twig to it. I satiate it by looking forward and saying:

“I guess so. Maybe summer next year will be different.”

The lights are on in the neighbors yard; the glow of it enters ours, but there is no sound. That’s good—if we saw them out, we’d have to wave hello and the special moment would be ruined. We could have always just not waved, but it would be rude. We’ve been neighbors with them for as long as I’ve been alive. You play with another twig in your hands, distracted by something, and say:

“Gosh. I hope not. I like things just the way they are.”

Crickets. We’ve always lived here, in a big dark house with this big darker yard. Usually, it’s not the way that it is now. It doesn’t usually sit beside us and gnaw at our ankles, waiting for us to drop a morsel it can chew on instead. It’s just that there are certain moments. There are just certain moments when I think about everything we’ve done this summer and everything we’ve done in past summers and how much I’ve enjoyed it all—that it’s likely I’ve enjoyed it too much and that things would be much easier if we’d had no fun at all. The backyard is lovely in the daytime. There are sycamore trees, thick and long, that have been here since the house was first built. We’ve really had a lot of fun here, when I think about it. There are just certain moments when I think too much about this and I say things to you like:

“When I think about how we won’t live here forever—I mean, when I think about the way things are going to change, it makes me wish that I were just dead already.”

I think of the hot concrete around swimming pools in July and the way that your whole body feels tired after swimming in the ocean all day. I think of how after those kinds of days, it would always be here, in this house, that we came back to sleep. Well, we slept here all days, obviously, but those days especially. I’m thinking of Christmas Eve, when we wouldn’t really sleep at all. I’m thinking of what all that felt like, the certain electricity to it, sort of like how there is now. There is electricity now, but the current is different. The giver and the receiver must have forever changed, with age. I think of this as heat lightning flashes. That doesn’t make any sense—it feels so cold outside. I am thinking of all these things and will think of them for the rest of my life, probably, but you give me a kind break from thinking at all when you say to me:

“Me too. But you shouldn’t say that.”

Crickets. No, I shouldn’t say that. No one should say anything, ever. Just enjoy your life and your summers and let that be the end of it. My stomach doesn’t hurt so much anymore, there’s just a tiredness. We can’t live here forever, you know. Someday someone else will move in and all the summertimes that were so important to us will mean nothing to no one. Our neighbors will move too and it will be someone else turning on the light in their backyard. Someone else to wave, too. Wherever we will be, of course, I don’t know, but every time I think of it, it seems to make the summer end sooner.

We agree that it is late and cold and that it's probably best to go to bed now. I wait for you to turn and go inside, wanting to follow your lead, but you stay, still and quiet as ever.

Michaela Baus is a student and writer residing in Philadelphia. Her work has been published in Refine Magazine and Hyphen Literary Magazine.