Timothy C. Goodwin
Heatwave
The humidity sloshes in over the sills of our southeast-facing windows and the air conditioner’s lone working mode—FAN ONLY—churns the heat into a thick cream, so you lead me by the hand from our convection oven studio apartment and out into the streets where I pull like a powerless puppy towards someplace with some permanency: a coffee shop for an iced anything, maybe, or a diner to run our hands over the cool plastic menus, but you like aiming us towards high-end apartment buildings to fake out the sleepier doormen bent over their phones who then—caught!—snap their heads up and their phones down to quickly open the door in their strictly-choreographed dance step, letting a pane of ice-cold air smash over us as we are invited home to a life of full-lunged square footage, of cold-floored bathrooms that you can hold your arms out in and not touch any walls, of high-end digital thermometers that tune perfect frostiness like favorite radio stations, only to break our trajectory at the last minute with a faux-startled face/faux-embarrassed giggle that says Oh we don’t live here—LOL—we live somewhere much nicer.
Timothy C. Goodwin graduated in writing from the University of New Orleans and has had work included in JAKE, Maudlin House, Roi Fainéant, The Centifictionist, BULLSHIT, and elsewhere. Timothy is the host of the Tiffin Inn Writing Workshop podcast and lives in NYC.
