~This story previously appeared in Arroyo Literary Review (2014).
~Selected by Kenneth Fleming, Assistant Editor for Fiction
He isn’t bothering anybody. He’s just sitting in his car in the parking
lot by the freshly mown soccer fields, waiting for his daughter to be done with
practice. He isn’t looking at anything in particular, just gazing out in the
direction of his pony-tailed daughter and her friends, running forward and back
across the field, their cheeks flushed and their toothpick legs like pinwheels
in their high rainbow socks.
But he isn’t really watching them,
nor is he particularly aware of the pigeons squatting along the telephone wire
in the distance, clumped together like old ladies gossiping, nor of the acute blue
of the sky behind them, so blue it almost seems artificial. He gazes towards
all of these things but he doesn’t really see them, in the way one stares off
vacantly into space when deep in thought or daydreaming.
He isn’t daydreaming or deep in
thought, but the opposite. His mind is blank, blissfully blank, like the clear
blue bowl of a sky above them, only an occasional cloud-thought skittering
past, dissipating before it wakes him from peaceful emptiness.
It is a shadow that finally rouses
him, falling across his face like a summons. He glances up through the
dirt-streaked windshield, expecting to see the shiny red face of his daughter,
but instead he is met with the round, shapely behind of a young woman. Tight
Lycra shorts grip her perfect, tan thighs. He takes in the smooth-shaven backs
of her knees, her slender calves tapering down to exquisite ankles, her running
shoes edged in pink trim.
Quickly he looks away, out at the
blue sky, the telephone poles, the gray brick restrooms huddled in the midst of
green expanse of soccer fields—but immediately his eyes itch to return to her.
She is, after all, standing right in front of his car. Her curvaceous lower
half directly at his eye level. Where else is he supposed to look?
He looks.
