town of planks

Sunlight mounted the room as pyramids. The heat, and there was so much of it, coughed up a sleazy barroomish haze. I was choking on the humidity, but the windows had long since swollen stuck and I'd promised I'd wait there.

This was around the holiday, but after.

The town—three irregular peels of streets hemmed by shops filled with dunes of souvenirs—was in its midweek slump. It was like how it becomes when visitors leave after the on-season finally gasps to a close. Only then it’s stiller and we sleep easy.

I'd been a beast, something slovenly and low. So when she'd said, "Wait, I need this," with stabbed-through urgency, I realized this might be the chance I thought I'd never have to bounce back to being the way I'd always imagined I could.

She wasn't from here. She was another of those who filtered in and out during that brief stretch when the weather lets up and unfreezes the lakes. Her features were toneless; she didn't stay for long, but we kept in touch over a diminutive pile of years. I'd pay for tickets to visit her in the denser southern part of the state.

For the telling, she'd managed to tug extra life out of her time off, so I said I'd be here and I was, drained-feeling, asphyxiated and fluvial in the hot room.

Then the sun got lower and I finally heard the gravelly sound of her approach. Looking out, I saw her mouth hitched into something like a grin through the snare of her windshield. What she'd put to me, I knew then, would not be what I'd wanted.