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Frozen Outlands
by Kathleen Brenock He’s one of those guys who uses a person’s name all the time, yet when he tosses her name in after a “Hey there,” it makes her feel like she’s swimming in honey, and she stops and watches him as he lopes down the hall and catches up to his girlfriend, to wrap his lanky arms around her and squeeze her until she squeals “no.” And, the fact is, she’s been swirling his name with her own in multicolored pen across her notes on Super Novas and has been spending way too much time thinking about him taking off his track shirt in slow-mo, knowing he’s not going to do that for her, because he’s in the orbit with the likes of Saturn and Mars and she’s more like Pluto. Then walking home, she hears a beep and it’s him driving by in his blue pick-up and she wonders how he thinks of her, a lesser known and lesser endowed, and the thought washes over her that he might feel bad for her, being billions of years away from the sun; and that’s why he’s been lobbing his golden hellos in her direction. And the thought of being pitied makes the blood rush to her face and she resolves that the next time she sees him, she’s going to let him know that the way she sees it, he’s Pluto, cold and icy, tossing people’s names around like it didn’t matter, and she’s the hot, hot sun who would have let him squeeze her and wouldn’t have told him no. |
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