Riverview Roving into Summer

The narrow office is dim, like the interior of a grocery store freezer, but instead of a chilling curtain hanging in the secluded air, a thick, musty, scent drips off the books that stretch from floor to ceiling.

One small window in this same closet, behind the desk, is cracked in hopes that a breeze might dance through the screened entrance into Riverview. But it seems that sweat seeps through the small wire holes, like honeycomb, and magnetically gathers on skin, both visible and hidden beneath the layers of clothes that should be peeled off.

She sits, nervously on the chair, sucking in the heavy, hot air. Maybe, she thinks, that the words scattered throughout the pages and pages of the endless rows of books will gather and align like a constellation and escape through her pencil in the form of a poem.

Becoming one with the chair, she sinks into the plastic as if it was a burnt marshmallow and just as sticky. Shifting uncomfortably, she lifts one leg that is exposed from her short skirt to cross it over the other. The skin strips like scotch tape from the cracked, green seat that is as uneven as summer road construction.

A film remnant of her remains on the chair, like the third layer of a large onion. Her leg stings and cries as if it were an eye revealed to the fresh, chopped, icy vegetable. The folded legs quickly merge into one trunk of flesh that trickles drops of heat.

The confining denim skirt rides up her smooth thighs and hangs much like a parka would on an explorer traveling the South Pole. Heat emits from the collar of her shirt and though it is a thin, white t-shirt, it feels like fleece. Her cheeks are as red as the painted pistachios she had for a snack, but the colour had smeared off the shells and onto the reused Ziploc.

She scrapes the turtle-like chair across the cool floor and slides off her sandals, resting her feet on the floor – her only relief. On the desk she rests her elbow in efforts to hold herself up, though she has nothing to keep her eyelids from falling.

*****

When he smiles at her, after she gracefully had collapsed in the chair, she notices the lines that appear on his face. Each line, she supposes has a story, a meaning in his life. Or perhaps, with lids open and hazel eyes penetrating his features, she muses that each line is a woman in his life. Inspiration always falls in her lap when she comes, but if it doesn’t get on paper in his office and she tries to carry it out in her hands like a watermelon, it disappears as soon as she leaves the threshold of his powerful sphere.

His hands fold together on his desk like two doves. Gentle, but gray and blue tinted from the writing, she wonders how they would feel on her skin. To release that thought, to let it go back to the wild – where it came from, she glances around the room. Counting the typewriters that inhabit the room, she notices they gleam like the trophies in the athletic department.

Liberating the doves, he stands and shuffles over to shelf that is home to the music of Jimmy Buffet. He clicks the machine a few times, until Jimmy is so faint in the distance that she is unable to escape to the beach. As he returns to his throne, he bumps the stack of papers that resemble wilted pancakes. His baseball that sat on the corner of his desk, where you would normally find one’s business cards, rolled off the edge.

She moved to catch it, she pushed together her forearms and it spooled towards her body escaping her net of arms and landing with a flood in her lap. She let her head shift and she stared at the ball on her skirt. She wondered, would it melt, like chocolate on a stove? It felt heavy, like a paper weight, but only for those few moments that stretched out like the last minutes of her math class. His hand swiftly flew down, brushed her leg and then the denim and took his ball back. The ball rested in his palms as he held it like an egg and brought it toward his weathered lips.

His lips had told many stories and stimulated many of his students into writing.

She let her feet slip across the floor, cool, but dusty and under the desk. She bumped his feet. They were in shoes. She wondered if they were the tennis shoes his wife always wanted him to throw out. His feet remained stationary, planted on the ground and unwilling to forfeit the space.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash