Texas

In summer, when rain is scarce, the grass becomes brittle like the husks of locusts and the burrs are keen as green mesquite thorns. Days seem longest when the sun rides high in the glaring utterness of August, when the prickly pear’s yellow flowers begin to wrinkle, searing purple, before shriveling to puckered, withered figs. Long tangles of pasture become cruel to the sensibilities of mammals; where trees are few, the sky and the stupefied earth hum together, a slow arhythmic cadence which sounds, to the human ear, like it might be the music of death, although it isn’t that, exactly—it is the sound of desert heat, the obscene language of the sun, too lucid for the sensibilities of we made brittle as summer grass.