Heatwave

Written off the prompt "heatwave" for a story-a-week contest. This is the first story.



When she kissed me it was like rain falling. And like rain in a heatwave, it was something that didn’t keep secret for long, though I’ll grant you I never tried because not only were we in full view of at least three people but we’re a small town. A close-knit town, and my parents are great favorites, not to mention the biggest gossips in fifty miles, on account of the place they run, a general store everyone goes to that’s just as bad as a younger sibling, always showing me up. You’ve got a kid sister what’s a genius, a brat brother who’s more successful’n you’ll ever be, you know.

When I say it’s a small town I mean it. Edge to edge it’s twenty minutes on a bike, pedaling fast the whole time, and then outside of that farmlands, all the way to the next of the small towns just out of sight on every side. Half the roads are dusty, unpaved or half-paved, so that trucks are gray-brown with dust in summer and bumper-deep in mud come the spring rains. Got everything we need though, grocery and gas and library. Library’s the best. There’s not much to do here, especially in the hour after milking ends and you’ve left the house and when school begins. Librarians here get up early. They have to, because a lot of them are farm girls too, and they’ve got cows at home waiting for them just like I do, and they’ve got to close early to get to milking before dinner, and it gets dark so early most of the year.

It’s strange to see them, sitting reading War and Peace and chewing on a long strand of hay that had somehow worked its way into their tight-braided hair during the morning feed. But then I’m no better than them, with my stained jeans and plaid shirts and workboots, and sometimes with the horse tied up out back, if I’m in an old-west mood or can’t get the car. And I’m there every week at the outside, working my way through the fiction section three books at a time. Library’s so small that’s all they’ll let you take out at once but it suits me, because with the work I’m doing, at school and on the farm, three books is bout all I can manage.

It’s the library what betrays how close-knit the town is. They all know my name there, all the librarians, who range from high-schoolers working as pages to old women who knew my mother as a girl, and they know too the name of my horse and the calf that was born this spring to the heifer my father bought at auction for next to nothing, and what kind of books I liked when I was five, and where I went last year over the Christmas holidays. I never give thought to it ‘because I know those things about all them too.

Well. All of them except the one I met the July day I forgot the postcard.

See, there’s a girl I met once when I was younger who I fell half in love with even though we both of us pretended that’s not what it was, and though we’ve both moved on since the month we spent sneaking into haylofts the summer we graduated, she still writes to me sometimes. Been gone years but she writes. She left this small town before it could get into her bones like it got into mine, she said, before the feel of a cow’s hide and the scent of thunderstorms building sank into her like water. She writes from Australia, from France, from a tiny village in Mongolia and the biggest city in Mexico. I save all the cards and the occasional letters, and when I’m tired and lonely I pull them out and remember that once she asked me to go with her.

But some things you can’t leave behind, and we both knew what I would tell her, and so nothing came of it. She wrote instead, every few weeks and signed the cards and letters, with love, Anna, because there are some things that you hold onto past the point of returning, and she loved me, I think, more than I loved her. The card I left that day in the book I returned came from Melbourne, a patchwork of photographs, wallabies and trams and the wide Yarra River at dusk. I had only gotten it a few days before, and when it came in I was reading, and so it became a bookmark, marking my spot in an already well-thumbed volume of poems. I was on poets that week for no reason except that my attention span was shorter than usual thanks to a sick bull with a temper, and poems tend to be both brief and a glimpse of a world higher and brighter than mine.

And of course I returned the book, because I’ve only not returned one book in the years I’ve lived here, and that was the fault of being so tired out after a day out with the vet I fell asleep in the bath reading. So I handed it over, and registered that the librarian who took it from me was unfamiliar, and pretty in way of girls who work for a living, hands strong and square, long brown hair in a ponytail, wearing jeans that were worn but clean and a faded green cotton button-down. She looked like half the girls I knew, but it was the smile that caught and held me for an extra second, and the way her eyes flicked up and down me so fast I couldn’t be sure but I blushed all the same. Blushed and bolted and almost stumbled and I’d swear I felt those blue-gray eyes on my back as I headed up the narrow stairs towards Fiction.

She was the one who brought me the postcard I’d left behind in my rush, one of the older librarians having recognized my name when she checked it back in, and after calling my house and finding no one home, decided I was still in the library and sent the brown-haired girl to find me. It didn’t take her long, though for the sake of those who might be watching and wonder that she knew exactly where I was when we’d never once spoken, she told me later that she’d wandered through Biography and Reference before taking a right at Children’s and going up the stairs to where I sat in one of the corner chairs. She caught me all unaware, legs curled beneath me, overshirt forgotten on the back of the chair, thumbnail caught in my teeth as I read, deaf and blind to the world around me until she touched my bare shoulder.

Her fingers were warm and I jumped. That wasn’t the day she kissed me, but it was that touch that first made me want her to. That and the curves of her under the worn clothes, the clean scent of her, like dust and grass damped down by rain. The girl must have said something that day, something small – her name, maybe, which was Sam – Samantha – but I don’t remember her saying it. I only remember the way she let our skin brush when she handed me the card, the look in her eyes that let me know she’d read it and guessed that Anna was no sister or cousin or aunt but something else entirely, and I remember looking up at her and knowing in a way I could never put words to that she, too, was something else entirely.

After that I remember only the next week stretching out hot and long, and the one after that, and I wonder looking back if the heatwave was real or if it was me feeling the tension stretching between me and Sam in a way I understood, farmgirl-simple. Because I remember too that the heat broke the day she first found me more or less alone, the smell of a storm in the air when she caught me beside my truck as I left the library, having run after me out a side door only the librarians ever used, her feet in riding boots slamming the sun-baked pavement with the single-minded intensity of thunder rolling in.

When she finally kissed me it tasted like rain.