Some few hours before a sloe-black sky would feel the prick of the crescent moon, she called my attention to the far ridge, where a blue mist rose over the leafless wood.
For a moment, we discussed the source: smoke? reflection of an unseen pond? but we couldn’t muster the energy – we didn’t amount to enough to care to know.
We had gotten nowhere in no time at all. A luckier couple, much less lovers, would have made up a story out of the blue, delighted by the emergence of Spring, at last.
All we could do was bounce memories off one another, carefully cut and pasted for the telling:
I noted where I first saw a scarlet tanager, but not the girl who was with me then, whose areolae were paler than scarlet; and she pointed to the bench by the pond, smiling in silence at the memory of what went down her last time there.
Ten days into April, some months since our first date, we parted.
It was the year we fined God for keeping Winter out past the date it was due back in the library of the mind, in the universal imagination.
– Dave Read