a summer noon

That Mitsubishi air conditioner is the most powerful in our home, so it carries the heaviest mission to be put in the living room and kept running all day long when summer comes. When I try to sit on the sofa which is in front of the air conditioner, I am warned that I will catch a cold if I sit there. To avoid the mid-July’s burning sunlight, we put the curtain on, so the living room always has a dimmed but warm tone which highlights this vagueness and haziness that makes my grandpa fall asleep easily for hours when he sits on the sofa just for a nap. He never gets a cold, as far as I know. Grandma is doing housework in the dining room, and then she sits on the first stair, waving her plastic fan which she got for free from a mailed-in promotion gift by the supermarket nearby. She has another fan from someone on the street who wanted to sell her some health supplement, but it had a poor quality so it broke. 

Dad sleeps in my bedroom, to avoid Mom’s bothering phone calls from her customers making appointments in her restaurant. As expected, Mom’s phone calls never stop, but she manages to find some gap to take the nap, and that snore is so hard that can transmit through doors to my ear, as I’m sitting inside the small study area which was originally a balcony of my bedroom, but I am not studying - I’m playing video games. I take off my headphones and start to listen to these natural sounds flowing inside the space. Hard snores continue from Mom, Dad is always quiet only with regular breath. I lightly walk out of my room, seeing Grandma move to Grandpa’s side, lying against the sofa, staring at the blank TV, having a sober dream when Grandpa is murmuring in his own dream. Hearing my footsteps, Grandma turns her face to me. In the Chinese calendar, we share the same zodiac, as we’re both dragons. Realizing we’re the only two people awake, Grandma tells me that we’re like dragons supervising the world above the cloud, waving her fan to cool me, without fearing if I will get a cold.