by Aurora Gory Alice

Created on: August 12, 2010

After a long first week of a demanding construction project, Abbey was ready to kick back.  She sat on the covered porch and opened another beer.  Freshly showered and shaved, her broken-in clothes and bare feet felt like vacation.  Abbey took a deep breath and looked at the sky.  It was greenish-black with a scary luminescence.  The humidity was heavy, but the thunder in the distance foretold of relief. 

It wasn’t a busy street.  The houses in the neighborhood were older with bigger yards than the ones in the suburbs.  Abbey’s was a fixer-upper on which she had made substantial progress.  She had invested a disproportionately large amount of time and money on the porch.  The way the ground was shadowed out suggested that that investment would pay dividends today in the form of box seats for the storm of the summer.

One beer later the rain started.  Another beer and the lightning was upon her.  This wasn’t the normal white, sky-filling lightning illumiating the skyline.   This lightning was jagged, purple, and smelled like electricity.  It wasn’t there to make things pretty.  Abbey was enjoying the spectacle and the fear it inspired in her.  She felt small, helpless, but alive. 

Out of the wall of rain and steam rising off the road she came: the biker.  Bikers on this road were not uncommon, but coming out of this Tarantino-like backdrop this biker seemed surreal.  Lightning scorched the earth all along her route, as if it was gunning for her specifically. Abbey felt a surge of adrenaline set her on fire as she hopped over the wall of the porch.  She ran towards the road waving her arms and gesturing the biker towards the house.  The biker rode straight into the yard at Abbey.  Before the bike even slowed down, the biker pushed it away from her, using Abbey to keep from falling as her feet hit the ground.  Clumsily but quickly, they dove up onto the porch. 

Lying on the beautiful, polished hardwood floor of the porch soaking wet and winded, the biker grabbed the beer Abbey had been drinking.  She took a long drink, a deep breath, and looked at Abbey.

“Beautiful porch,” she said.

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