Fiction Outtake: Hot

I don’t know how many of you guys read Edittorrent and their neat blog. All you writers, you should be.

But anyway, someone other than me offered up the first three lines of a manuscript for their comments and a discussion ensued. A question arose: how can you create heat visually? Short of just posting a picture of Mitchell, this is what I wound up with. While it doesn’t fully answer the question, I like it. Hope you do, too.

Mitchell slid his sunglasses into place and waited for Charlie’s nod. The first car had left without him and Daniel when Charlie had decided to play Papa Tour Manager and order them back upstairs to change into shorts. Now, they were stuck waiting for a lift.

The same car pulled up, easily recognizable by its sun-faded red, and Mitchell went outside first, understanding immediately why Daniel kept dawdling. It was like walking into a wall of heat, a studded one that attacked every pore on his face so that they constricted, more parched than the worst hangover. He was suddenly all too aware of every single last eyebrow hair — including the ones the makeup people had waxed off three weeks ago for that damn photo shoot. And he swore the cleft in his chin got deeper as it, too, sought the shade of his sunglasses.

His arms were instantly slick with sweat that didn’t cool, the small of his back turned into a puddle, and his legs tried doing the same shrinking thing as his face. His lips felt like dried-out glue: fragile, brittle, and broken.

All in the two steps it took to get into the car’s front seat.

“Holy fuck,” he said, leaning toward the vent and adjusting it so it blew directly on his face. He gasped at its nominal coolness, alerted to the fact that he hadn’t been able to breathe at all while out there. “You live here?” he asked the driver, lifting his sunglasses so they’d stop sliding away. Fuckers just might dangle from his ears if he wasn’t careful.

Daniel and Charlie slid into the back seat. Daniel pulled a ponytail holder out of his pocket and peeled his curls away from his face.

“M, want one?”

Mitchell slid his hand underneath his hair and encountered a swamp. It wasn’t a bad idea, but who knew who’d see him? No one had ever seen him with his hair off his face. Maybe Kerri, but if she did, she was the one who’d shoved it away.

“I think I want to be in Europe already,” Mitchell said, leaning away from the air and angling it more toward the back seat. “We are idiots for touring the States in the summer.”

“We’ll be there in two weeks.”

“If we don’t fucking melt first.”

“Is it supposed to cool off by showtime?” Daniel asked.

Mitchell reached for his lip balm and looked over his shoulder at Charlie. Who was squirming.

It was going to be a brutal show, Mitchell thought. One of those nights where he took the stage in shoes, shorts, and guitar and spent most of the two hours wishing he could take even more off. At least he’d be slick with sweat and his skin wouldn’t try to shrivel up again. That had sucked.

And they still had to get out of the car and into the backstage area.

Talk about things that sucked.