Crandall, TX 9/25

Waiting for a life to materialise.

The house sits at the intersection that dissects town in four. From her vantage point on its porch, she watches the trucks and automobiles roll up to the four-way stop from each direction throughout the day.

Her fingers trace the frail pages of an old magazine full of starlets. It’s high summer and every cube of ice in her tea has long vanished in the time she’s been draped across the wicker furniture. A ring of moisture’s formed at the base of the glass. It encircles the face of a beautiful girl like a halo, reminding her of the prayer card pressed between the pages of her diary.

A yard down the street is being mown and the air is blurred by a haze of debris, as though the whole world’s out of focus. Sun rays pierce that thick atmosphere of clippings and dry earth stirred up by mower blades. Upstairs, her mother sneezes, despite the pills her doctor prescribed for hay fever.

She waits on the porch every day through summer. From the time her father leaves for work, until the hour his truck’s engine heralds his impending return. The loud growl of the V8 can always be heard from a block away. A beast that lives beneath the gleaming skin of that new machine.

She waits for a boy who’ll take her away from the rural boredom that enshrouds her life. A boy she dreams about through sticky nights, when the box fan can’t cool her thoughts in that feverish heat.

She waits for the boy who’ll take her to the honky-tonks whispered about by seniors in the girls’ room at school. Places down the dirt roads outside town, where headlights cut the dust clouds of coming-and-going cars, and the music shakes the boards. Where beer spills over parted lips and bodies meet. Where the sweat soaks through the cotton and people are alive.