" The scents bring us back. That’s what Mr. Agrawal says. He says the scents of summer are the most potent, the most enduring.

The sun beats hard in Duxton, Massachusetts, in late July. It shrivels soft things: flower petals, the worms that struggle up through the ground after a midday shower. The sun here cares nothing for exteriors. It is interested only in essences, the soft middles. Mr. Agrawal doesn’t bother to pick the ripening tomatoes in the garden, infested with rangy weeds and fat iridescent beetles. He says he likes the smell of the flesh once the heat has sizzled the peel.


--from "Wayward," a short story by Chandra Prasad in MIXED: An Anthology of Short Fiction on the Multiracial Experience "

― Chandra Prasad