Fragments 1

M (indicates name beginning with letter) was just thirteen when the late August winds carried a tropical/foreign heat to her town. [Already] the schoolless summer days had [long since)] turned from sweet to sickening, the unbridled hours warping and bleeding without the steady, measuring beat of the classroom bell...

Usually M stayed in bed until lunchtime and then passed the remainder of the day in a hazy stupefaction/willful numbness designed to keep all [form of] sensation, including the heat, out. On the last Saturday of the month, however, she was up at dawn, stirred awake by the familiar grumble of her father's car. It was barely six and the suffocating air that had melted in the night was already seeping its way back into the house. She leaned out of her window just in time to see the gray truck make a brisk left from her street and onto the main roadway.

By the time the sun reached its midday post, the morning's moisture had left the earth/ground and clung to the air so that, venturing out, a body didn't know whether to walk or swim. Neither choice appealed to M, who instead decided on utter stillness and sat sullenly loathing the soaking sensation from her spot on the back lawn beneath the mulberry tree. Her petulant expression was augmented by the dimpled adolescence that stubbornly lingered on her face/cheeks despite her having reached, as she was apt to call it, the fullness of her thirteen years. (quotes?)

space before her blurred by cloud of flies and dandelion fluff

R has nice hands except when he's talking about [ ]. Talking about [ ] he looks a little frightening. But he has nice hands like Father, separate from the rest of his body and still, so very still. But the rest of him is not like Father, or anyway my father. He is like his father, Mr. W who helps the criminals in H-- and walks on only the front half of his feet as if he relied on the wind and speaks in whispers except when he's defending the criminals. R's like that. Except for his hands, which are like Father's.

Separate fragment: Thomas hadn't eaten in five days. On the sixth day, the cold chicken he'd ventured to swallow for breakfast fell out of his stomach and onto the bathroom floor. He made a disgusted face but quickly mopped it up before the cat, Dr. Eversby, got the chance and then made himeself some tea. [Days seven and eight fared little better. When his mother came by on the eleventh day to borrow his gardening shears, she discovered him lying face down in the kitchen clutching a cup of vanilla yogurt, half the contents of which had been lapped up by Dr. Eversby. Thomas, along with the rest of the yogurt, had expired.] (doesn't die?)