Cityscapes

need to bring and end up feeling hotter that way. At noon the temperature was already over 104 ˚F and that’s nothing, my father never lets me go out in the summer, when it hits 140 ˚F, he says daddy’s little girl is too small to handle that type of heat. He says it, the one who has been in a wheelchair since a truck crushed him among the debris of one of the Reborn Rivers, Piety, which for some time was called the Miguel Alemán Viaduct. Sometimes he forgets that he is alive thanks to me. At night, the distant sound of beat-­‐up ceiling fans won’t let us sleep.

***

You know when I realized this heat wasn’t normal? When I felt the skin of my eyelids for the first time. Then I began to feel my hot eyes, at that temperature lighters burst in pockets and it was normal to see people with broken thighs or chests in the emergency room.

***

Nobody in this city was prepared for what was coming. In Hermosillo or Monterrey, they had been “practicing” for years, so to speak. But in Mexico City almost nobody had air conditioning in their homes, so when the first heat wave came people didn’t know where to take cover. The scarcity

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