Spring Story
Matthew Ryan Fischer
It was the day before the first day of spring, but
it hardly felt like any sort of rebirth of nature or seasonal change. The temperature was stubbornly clinging to
the high 30’s and low 40’s during the day.
Some foolish flowers had begun to appear as well as some new blades of
grass, but nothing felt like spring was supposed to feel. And an additional twenty-four hours wasn’t
going to change that. Aimee and Nick sat
on the dock at Lake Hadler, watching the sunlight bounce off the water.
Aimee and Nick had met the previous weekend. They had both attended an Ides of March party
thrown by mutual friends of friends.
Togas were mandatory; backstabbing and dire prophecies were
optional. Aimee made a toga out of a
spare peach colored sheet. She put a lot
of work into it to make it look beautiful, but then the weather turned colder
and suddenly a toga with bare arms and a shoulder seemed like a very foolish
costume. She wore a sweater and pants
underneath and ruined any illusion of Roman royalty that she had worked to
created. Nick spent all of three minutes
online to discover that purple was a sign of royalty in ancient Rome. He didn’t have any purple sheets and wasn’t
going to go out and buy any. He found a
dark blue sheet and some clothes pins and put himself together just enough to
go and have some fun.
They would argue later just who noticed whom first,
but the real point was that their distinctive choices allowed them both to
stand out in the crowd enough to be noticed.
Aimee was able to mock Nick’s fashion failure and poor costuming skills,
while Nick was able to make fun of the fact that she had clothes on and must be
of a cold blooded nature. For attempts
at playful party flirting, there have been worse jobs done.
Nick suggested they meet four days later and
celebrate the changing of the seasons.
It would give them a chance to pretend that spring really had come and
warmth was on the way.
And so they met on the 19th – the day
before spring. It felt nothing like
spring. The high that day at Lake Hadler
was forty-three degrees Fahrenheit. The
breeze off the water made it feel ever colder.
“This is stupid.”
“You scared?” joked Nick.
“No. It’s
just that it’s nearly freezing.”
“That’s what makes it fun.”
“You’re an idiot.”
“You’re scared.”
“You know there are easier ways to see me naked,
some without the threat of hypothermia.”
“Yeah, but none quite like this or quite so
memorable. Don’t you want our first date
to be memorable?”
Aimee didn’t answer and she didn’t budge from her
seat. Nick stood up, removed his shirt
and dropped his pants. He took a running
leap off the dock and into the freezing water.
The splash got Aimee wet, but she wasn’t mad. She laughed and laughed. Moments later, she joined him in the water.
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