Summer Memories

It was a sweltering August evening, the kind that makes your toenails slide off your toes. I'd just finished shucking the corn out on the front porch for Ma when I saw him ride up on his motorcycle. He must've stopped to check his back tire, because he got off and looked at his back tire. I sat up and looked at him.

He had a broken-in black leather face and ripped jeans that went all the way up to his legs. When he leaned over to check the tire, a loose tendril of dirty blond hair fell over his forehead. He ran his chicken fingers through those honeyed locks it in a way that could only be described as "sultry golf dad." I was hooked like a golf dad on chicken fingers (w/honey mustard sauce).

I could tell he wanted to stop in for a glass of lemonade mixed with whole milk, but something wouldn't let him. Was it the look in my eyes? The scent of perspiration in the air around my armpits and crotch? Or was it the stuffed dog he had strapped into his sidecar that clearly wanted to go home now for sleepy bed-bye time?

I'll never know what was going through that crazy, ding-dong brain of his when he peeled out, giving me a single nod of the head, wink of the eye, and wink of the other eye, twice, as if he was trying to tell me the letter W in morse code. I stood as he rode on, into the wavy blur of the horizon, leaving only the sounds of crickets and my own heart beating those crickets to death with a teeny tiny meat cleaver behind.

I never saw him again — that white buffalo of a shadow of a mystery of a ghost of a man — but I never forgot him either. And here I am, 17 minutes later, still wondering if he ever thinks about me, just a girl in the top half of a spacesuit, shucking corn on the front porch on that hot, beefy August night.