Paranormal
Supernatural

A Summer Morning  ·  Outside of Mercy, Georgia

          The sun burst through open windows.  A breeze came with it, channeled off the lakes by the canopy of tree.  The freshness of the morning, a combination of damp, leaf-mantled clay and forest overhang, drifted into the bedroom.  Nicole nestled at Daniel’s side.  Daniel ran his fingers along her cheek and kissed her, then slept again.
          But Nicole did not sleep.  She savored the beautifully awakening day and the comfort of her lover’s arm around her.  She rested like that, full of satisfied thoughts, until she heard the approach of an automobile, followed moments later by the open and close of the front door and the paddle of feet across the den floor.
          “Daniel?” she said, shaking him.
          “Yes?”
          “It’s late.”
          “Yes.  It is.”
          “It’s mid-morning.  We need to get to Mercy.”
          “Okay.  What should we do?”
          “Shower and leave.”
          “Who’s here to take us?”
          “Someone just drove up.”
          “Then perhaps there’s Mercy for us before noon.”
          He propped open an eye and grinned.  Nicole laughed.  She hugged him, kissed him, and found the stubble of his morning beard comforting in a way she was not quite sure.  She twisted upon his shoulder and ran her hand upon his chest.  He pulled her to him and buried a kiss into the fall of her hair as the door burst open upon them.  They sprang erect, each clasping the bed covers over their nudity.  The entering figure also bolted with surprise.
          “Romeo and Juliet!” Lavall shouted.
          “Professor Melton!” Nicole gasped.
          The professor threw his arms wide before the foot of the bed.
          “How wonderful!  How divine!  At last!  I knew it all along!”
          Lavall fell across the end of the bed and propped a cheek upon his elbow.  With his free hand he removed the derby from his balding head and twiddled it in practiced style.
          “Isn’t love wonderful.  The power of the unconscious mind—isn’t it wonderful?  Here, having embraced in the passion of a desperate moment, lay, I find, the Unlikelies!”  His eyes widened with self-manufactured surprise.  “The Unlikelies!  I like that.  Even if it is of my own coinage.  Two antagonists, forced together by the artificial pressures of Summer Theater.  You two, whom I’ve watched so busy hating one another that you could not see, as I saw, the start of love budding in your breasts.  Oh!  Fantastic!”
          The professor, gone a little wild-eyed, a touch of saliva playing at the corner of his mouth, leaned toward them.  His tilt turned into a roll which spun him upon the two pairs of calves beneath the sheets.  He flipped himself up and sat on the edge of the bed beside them.  He checked the lay of the blue and yellow plaid shirt which rose above his green and brown plaid pants, then returned his attention to the youths who continued their original wide-eyed stare at him.
          “And you are such a lovely pair,” he cried.  He sprang from them and paced to the door.  He whipped around.  “Young Daniel, you are fled from us.  Amorous Nicole, you shall return next term.  So love!  Love!  It comes so rarely and so fast, and then it’s gone—gone like the sounds of a wondrous piece of music—like the whisper of word in a great poetic scene.  Adieu!  Adieu!  Now I go for the cleaning crew.”
          Lavall proffered a bow, then flitted through the door, closing it behind him.  His feet played across the floor for a moment more as Nicole and Daniel sat speechless.  They heard the front door slam, followed by the ignition of the theater director's car.
          “Well, my beautiful,” Daniel sighed.  “You heard the professor.”
          “Yes, but which part?”
          “Love!  Love!  It comes so rarely and so fast . . . .”  He laughed.
          “And then it’s gone,” she murmured.
          She turned to him.  She allowed his lips to drop upon her neck, her shoulders, and to descend upon her breast.  She closed her eyes and took his head into her arms.  She fell into the pillows.  She moaned, and smiled with the pleasure he brought her.

                                                           -  -  -

          “You didn’t see me until the middle of your sophomore year because I was busy flunking out of Vanderbilt—having served time first at the University of Georgia and then at Auburn.  Somehow my mother, probably at great cost, and my father, to punish me at any cost, managed to get me enrolled in Mercy College.”
          “As a second quarter freshman?”  Nicole giggled.  She felt free;  almost silly with the sense of freedom.
          “That’s better than a no-quarter freshman.  And although I graduate with an average of only two-point-one, I’ve done it by making the Dean’s List for the last three quarters.”
          “During which time you took the last nine courses of the forty-eight, you tell me, that it took you to earn a thirty-six academic course degree?  You’re not impressing me, Daniel.”
          “I’m trying.  But you, never having been challenged by academic extinction because of the impending doom of jungle warfare scheduled for you if you dared to drop out, can’t understand how it has been to sit in a classroom too depressed and stoned to think.”
Nicole shrugged.
          “I don’t see why college is so hard for anybody.  I’m a quarter ahead with only two to go if I take an overload Winter Quarter.  That would mean a March graduation . . . and spring traveling Europe, my father has promised.”
         She cut a superior eye at Daniel and teased him with a laugh.  Daniel groaned and rolled his eyes upward as if seeking reprieve.  When he dropped his head, he found Nicole’s gaze upon him.
          “You make me feel good,” she said softly.
          He grinned shyly and nodded to her.
          “The professor was right, wasn’t he?  We’ve been in love all this time.”
          “I believe so. Yes . . . now.  I believe now,” Nicole answered.
          She slipped onto the arm Daniel offered her.  They walked for some time along the road from the cabin in the direction of the highway.  Neither spoke.
          “What do you plan to do?” she eventually asked.
          “Gather my bags from my dorm room, carry them way, way across town, and dump them in my bedroom at home.”
          “And then?”
          “Then, then, then . . . .”
          Closer to the highway than to the cabin, they found themselves upon a slight rise of the dirt road.  A chinaberry tree shaded their passage.  Birds sang from it.  Nearby, a barbed wire fence outlined a pasture edged with wild shrubs and patterned by thick hedgerows.  The land sloped downward toward the base of the two lakes and the stream that discharged them.  Beyond, extending to the greater horizon between earth and sky, stretched as far as they could see a summertime panorama of Georgia.
          Daniel stopped and leveled a worried eye at his new love.
          “Then, yes, I might go somewhere, Nicole.  Europe?  Maybe.  Maybe elsewhere nearer or afar.  Or, then, I might just stay here.  I wonder if either way there would be a difference—or if either way might be all the difference in the world.”
          Nicole frowned.
          “Why so glum?”
          Daniel swallowed.  His thoughts from months before gathered within him.  Futile of expression, he gestured into the austere blue of sky, the power of the sun drawing his view to a squint as he turned into it.
          “Is there another Georgia there, Nicole?  Is there another Georgia where heaven acts even as hell descends upon us?  Is that other Georgia on the face of this discrepant ball or is it somewhere above us where we like new Phoenicians tread;  some other planet around some other star which calls to us even though we cannot see it, blinded like we are by that one there above us now.”
          “Daniel, that’s…that’s…I would not think you thought such things,” Nicole whispered.
          “I never did, until these recent months.  The world an uproar;  war;  even those who seek peace, making war;  my life as I have known it at an end;  everybody with an opinion that would work for me, as long as it’s not mine.”
          He dropped to a knee at the side of the roadway.  He worked his palm upon the loamy top.
          “Watch this, Nicole," he said as she knelt beside him.  "See how I draw my fingers along the smoothness here;  how the sand falls back into the valleys made by the work of my fingers;  how the sand refills my work.  I sometimes think that’s the way it is with us.  The present doesn’t give us time to solve the past;  there’s no time left to plan the future.  We’re torn between what was and what might be.  And it seems that what we finally do, comes to nothing more than fingers through the sand.”
          He tossed a fistful of the earth to roadside.  Nicole scooped a sample of her own and watched the pristine stuff drain away between her fingers.  When she came to peer into an empty hand, she heard Daniel chuckle and felt the squeeze of his arm at her shoulder.  He helped her stand.  They brushed the residue from their palms and regained the thin dirt road in the walk toward their destination.