One bright day in the middle of the night, two dead boys got up to fight.

Back to back they faced each other, drew their swords and shot each other.

A deaf policeman who heard the noise, came to the rescue of the two dead boys.

If you don’t believe this lie is true, ask the blind man. He saw it, too.

Chills. I get chills. It’s a rhyme my father used to recite for me when I was an impressionable lad of 4 or 5. And for the rest of the night, I’d peer out windows half hoping, half dreading I’d see the two dead boys lumbering out of the darkness, all pale and stiff in the backyard.

I’m sorry. I don’t mean to creep you out. Please come back and I promise to play nice. It’s just that summer is winding down like a once-spectacular child’s toy. It gets dark too early and the nights are getting cool. It’s a haunted time of year.

As if the death of summer isn’t melancholy enough, now there are back-to-school signs up everywhere and the bus routes are listed in the paper. I feel for the poor kids who wait at bus stops with beach sand still gritty inside their shoes. You can hear the creak of swing-set chains as they blow around unoccupied in the wind.

Every year, I’m astounded by how undramatically and how quickly summer dies; how feebly it gives way to fall. Afternoons lose their blistering heat. Shadows grow longer by the dinner hour, and it’s no longer comfortable to cavort at midnight in shorts and nothing else.

Don’t ask me why, but I equate the passing of summer with the jingle about the two dead boys. Maybe it’s just another case of horrified anticipation. Instead of a pair of dead kids, I’m awaiting the grisly corpse of autumn to come lurching forth, like Lazarus on command. Like one of those dead lads, summer is a corpse that does not yet realize it is dead.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking I’m a morbid moron who shouldn’t pronounce the death of summer while it still lives on the calendar. And you’re right. It’s just that, as I write, hot, reliable August is being replaced by cruel, deceptive September.

“Look at me, I’m beautiful,” she says, year after year. “What would I possibly do to hurt you?”

Then the leaves dry up and blow away. There’s frost on the grass. You close the windows of the house and the high buzz of cicadas is gone.

That rancid, treacherous, September shrew. Hate her muchly, yes I do.

In another place, I suggested that we insert a new month between August and September. Just wedge the new month in there, like a scrap of cardboard stuffed under the leg of a wobbly table. We could call this month LaFlumber because it’s fun to say and, hey, I invented it.

Well, I suggested it and the outcry was enormous. Leave autumn alone, they said. Autumn is cool and beautiful and a person can sleep at night. The air is crisp, the sunsets are marvelous and blah blah blah.

One person accused me of blasphemy and cursed my “pagan calendar.” They babbled about cool afternoons and brisk nights. They prattled about the joys of foliage and the early dark. A few even said nice things about the snow. NICE THINGS ABOUT THE SNOW! For the love of solstice! How twisted is that?

The concept of LaFlumber and the 13-month year was not the hit I had hoped for. I was outnumbered overwhelmingly. So much for my presentation to Congress. So much for a grass-roots effort. Another August has come and gone and the treacherous wretch named September has seduced many more souls.

I’m on my own here, people. Just me and my ridiculous notions that no one will acknowledge. Just me and my late-summer lament that no one wants to listen to. Another man who wasn’t there.

Yesterday upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there.

He wasn’t there again today. I wish that man would go away.

Chills! I get chills!

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter. You can visit his blog at www.sunjournal.com.

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