Wide Blue Yonder by Thompson Jean

Author:Thompson, Jean [Thompson, Jean]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Published: 2010-05-12T04:00:00+00:00

City of Glass Towers

Josie and Mitch met at his place most afternoons around four, and hung out until it was dark, when they started feeling restless. They’d go get something to eat and drive around listening to music and not talking much, because they would have done most of that earlier. They were better at talking, Josie thought, when their skins could help. Once it was time for Mitch to go to work, he would drop her off at her car. Josie would wait around to see if it was a slow shift, because then he might come back to see her again. She loved it when he did that, when they could sit together in the squad car with the radio sending out its messages of vigilance and danger, Mitch, as always, looked handsome and severe in his uniform. Even now when she’d seen him put it on piece by piece, she marveled. His service revolver was holstered on his right hip. She could reach out and touch it where she sat. She wanted to shoot it but so far he hadn’t let her.

At any moment the radio might break in to send him in pursuit of the drunk and disorderlies or traffic accidents or whatever else her fellow citizens were amusing themselves with that evening. He’d kiss her, in a distracted fashion, and tell her to keep the car doors locked on her way home. She worried about him all the time. Even in Springfield there were plenty of guns and plenty of fools who might not have the ambition to be serious criminals but who could sure as hell pull a trigger. She knew that the odds were against this, and besides, it was not the kind of town where anyone died tragically. But as she drove through the quiet streets she couldn’t help feeling a tide of grief building in her, the nerve she plucked when she imagined him dead, gone, murdered, the deep pleasurable shameful wrench she could give herself whenever she chose.

Some nights it was almost chilly, a reminder that before too long summer would give itself a nudge and start its long slow decline toward winter and school and everything else that was normal and hideous and inescapable. She wondered what would happen then with her and Mitch. It was so hard to imagine the two of them in winter coats, scraping ice off the windshield. It was hard to imagine them anywhere except on these summer streets with the hot roiling smells of asphalt and cigarettes and something cherry-sweet, like candy left out all day in the sun.

There were times she was brave enough to think about the future, what she would get him for Christmas and Valentine’s Day. When she was eighteen they could move in together because she’d be old enough and no one could stop her. They wouldn’t have to stay in Springfield. They’d be so gone. Everybody would talk about them the way you talked about famous people from dull places, trying to believe they’d ever lived there.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.