| Thunder Sandwich #17
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 dweeb by jeff filipski |
| It was my first time at the Dunes and she was walking maybe a hundred yards ahead of me on the beach, along a sweeping curve that took her where she just touched the water at one point. If you followed that line of footprints and she stopped, you'd run right into her. I stepped in the same places where she stepped, right into her footprints. My stride matched hers but my bigger feet overwhelmed the tracks she had made. I imagined it was warm inside those footprints, her body temperature, and I walked slowly to keep my feet there as long as I could. She was very warm. I always move pretty slowly, so I don't think Ellen even noticed. She was ahead of me as always, now and then straying close to the tracks I was following, but veering away toward the lake just inches before breaking my connection with the woman in the distance. The woman had that curvy female kind of walk that works especially well in a bikini. You know the kind I mean. She was perfect at a hundred yards, and I imagined she was more perfect even up close. She didn't stop long enough for me to run into her, which would have been a problem with Ellen there anyway. But she did stop. She turned and looked back at me and then at Ellen, who was still looking at the water as we walked. Then she spotted the trail of footprints and me standing in them. She turned and walked away, faster now, and vanished around the rise of a dune. If Ellen had been looking, she'd have seen that my face was a bit redder than usual. Exertion? Sunburn? Embarrassment at being caught in an imaginary act of intimacy? Embarrassment at imagining I had been caught in an imaginary act? Ellen wasn't looking. She was now several yards ahead of me and still watching the waves come in from the lake to lap at the shoreline. When I reached the spot on the beach where the woman had disappeared behind the dune, she was gone, her footprints leading to the rickety wooden steps that ascended to the parking lot that led to the camp and then to the highway. Ellen was waiting for me. "Let's go," she said. "I don't like the look of that sky." "Yeah," I said. "Looks like a storm coming in." |
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| ISSN: 1534-4037 |
Edited by Jim Chandler & Haze McElhenny
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