FICTION
AUGUST
AJA GABEL
It was a town where not much happened, and
sound of Blair on his lips like a secret. He had gone off to
Maine for the summer with his girlfriend, to stay at her
parents’ summer home and learn to fish lobster on those
funny, modest boats.
The day Callam left, he came by her house at noon.
The broadness of the time of day made their tryst feel
risky, and afterward they lay in her bedroom with the
magnolias butting up against the window above. Blair
had kept the air conditioner off, and the dampness was
beginning to seep in. She closed her eyes and tried to
sleep, but saw it behind her shut lids—the metallic May
light burning through the window, the choked expanse of
summer laid out before her.
there was no way to measure time, except for the obscene
spring blooming of the magnolias hanging open in Blair’s
front yard until they were tamped down by the June fleet
of college students headed to Roanoke or Chincoteague,
where they would live in a summer different and more
purposeful than this one. In the town, the mountains held
the wet air in the valley, and a late afternoon rain heralded
in most evenings, along with the door-to-door religious
boys, trying to hand off Bibles to unbelievers. Before the
rain, Blair lay by the pool of an apartment complex that
was not hers, her plastic drugstore sunglasses reflecting the
operatic sky, which would invariably break over her. Some
days, if no one else was at the pool, she would not move
from the beach chair and let the thin, clear rain cool her
off. It was a strange way toward relief.
It was Blair’s third summer in the town. She had come
from the north to teach early American history at the small
college. The first, busy year had ticked by almost without
her participation, and the second year with a different sort
of passivity—she had an affair. The boy, Callam, was an
engineering major and a swimmer, and the first of her
students to boldly call her by her first name in class, the
« . »
In late June, the locusts began to throb. Blair ate
toast and jam and coffee over the sink, looking out
the kitchen window to the neighbor’s house next door.
The neighbor’s son had returned from his own college,
and Blair listened to the tinny sounds of his unplugged
electric guitar drift over the lawn. Their small dog yapped
from time to time inside the house, and when Blair’s air
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PAINTING BY SOFIA BONATI