[melliedee]

Heartache? Okay, I've got lots of those! Here's RHG's favorite, but only cause she WAS THERE and it is a story about our first crush in the old neighborhood .... cool stuff, harley!

Why I Like Brawny Men

Apple Avenue’s only three-girl vaudeville: Me, Jenny, Krissy.
Skinny arms slung round each other as we step-kicked it barefoot
in the tall grass of our stage, a quagmire of junk weed,
that city green near yellow. Summer saw our flip-flops flung
on porches, the dirt on feet became callus, a hard sheen almost clean.

We swung out farther, our limb-addled dance of girlsexy suspended
when a chunk of glass bit into the soft of my arch. Blood trailed purple
back to pavement, sending Roger bounding out of his divorce-affordable
fixer-upper to my aid. He was thirty maybe, a strapping 70’s version
of Pa Ingalls with sideburns cut like fins that begged to test our girlness.

No accident we were playing in front of his house, all sparkle and indifference.
One big move and he scooped me into a swift curl, my foot dribbling,
heart beating an operatic systole at the sudden flex of his arms—
one different and othermanly beneath my knee, another thick under my neck.

I went soft and bright, from here to eternity, pouting for a kiss
when he plunked me on the trunk of his Buick, shucked off his T-shirt
and wound it over the cut. I forgot about the glass lodged like a dull diamond
in the butter of my foot—it was the way he whipped off that shirt—
anyone else would’ve run for a towel.

And there were my brown legs on his hot Buick, water from the hose pellucid
but for a pink strain of mingled blood, smarting at the gash, then numb.
He called me sweetheart and I leaned into the smooth of his shoulder,
wanting that name forever.