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My own secret life 
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Because of the storm, Annie is late getting in, so when I call to confirm, her booker and I reschedule for five. I slip my steamed glasses into a pocket, and open the phone booth door: Blind sleet stings my bare face. Ste Joseph is up on the mountain: No bookstores are near to kill time in, an hour won't get me back to my house, and with the Viagra, I need to keep fasting; no café.
So, head down, stiff-legged, I trudge, plowing the first path through the drifts on the sidewalk, white tinted pale orange by the sodium lamps; right on Bellevue, right up the mountain. Sleet pocks and splatters the shell of my parka.  The streetlights are haloed. In the dusk, yellow windows: In the warmth, people chatter, sip, laugh, smoke; or so it must be from the tilt and the blurred glint of what must be faces, arms, hands. My parka's well insulated: I'm feeling heat in my face, at the back of my neck. Back at the booth, I call in again. The dim hall is pale pink with bronze sconces throwing fans of gold light. Positioned in front of her peephole, having wiped the melted snow from my face with my hands in the elevator, having cleaned my glasses using my shirttail, I reach into my pants to adjust myself vertically: And knock. Branches sag with their white loads against the black sky. The plows have been out. I walk home in the street. A dragon rears up in the mist, resolves to a snowplow, steel blade striking sparks from the curb, throwing aside a snow spume; the driver's head alert in the cab. Car with chains mutter and clank. My boots squeak on the crushed snow. The snow brightens yellow in front of me: I look back over my shoulder: A bus— I run ahead to the stop, step up the wet black ridged rubber stair, show my pass, and enter: the warmth and the light and the bundled-up girls in their long knitted scarves and chignons and their musical chatter: Home. {280} THE FOUR SEASONS: Spring, summmer, fall, winter. 1 Comments:
John, By All characters and situations fictional. Copyright (c) 2003-2007 by "John Psmyth."
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