It's summer. Nighttime has descended, the air heavy with moisture and heat, and if you're the indulgent sort, it's oppressive. However, if you have it in you to see it all, because it's here and never was before or because it's here and always has been, it's another character in this story, just like the sweet-pungent aroma of the wet grass, like the wispy threads of smoke that encircle our heads before slinking off into the night, like the buzzing and the humming and the thud, thud, thud of the bugs in their frenzied pilgrimage to the security light behind us, for when this night of talking shit under the mesquite becomes a story about the old times itself. Help yourself to a cold one, we scraped enough together, after all, for the doce (and a pack of ciggies) and know that what's said tonight, exaggerations or outright lies though they might be, are honest expressions: the world, according to us, in our own words, for the first time and, the way things are going, perhaps the last. On our lips, a smile that is pleading and earnest: there's something I have to tell you, there's something I have to tell you, there's something I have to say.
