Exploration

Using an omniscient, descriptive 3rd person persona narrator, describe an 
emotionally dramatic situation.  Use metaphor and bring in the weather as a 
harbinger of events and mood.

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	This was the time of summer where the monsoon had teased, then gone 
bad, disappeared.  Three days of hope in the humid air had evaporated in a week
of cloudless sky and baked earth.  The west wind blew through the valley, 
hot-hot, stirring up blown dust and dust devils, and turning the sky to 
yellowed blue.  In those houses lucky enough to have them, swamp coolers 
whirred and rattled, blasting the rooms and hallways with cool, damp, mold-
ridden wind.  Chased outside by their mothers, children, like vampires 
shrinking from heat, stayed in the shade, finding the cool, concrete slabs on 
the north sides of houses to lie on, their skins sucking cool.  In the nearby 
open desert, cicada boys in the creosote droned their excitement to their 
ladies in brown, in the increasing heat.  Around three in the afternoon, if one
braved the sun and pulled the curtains to the side, a few white and blue clouds
would have puffed up low on the southeast horizon over Douglas, too far away to
be anything but a reminder of the missing rain, the hoped-for relief from the 
heat.

	But, two o’clock was the time of the day for siestas, wading pools and 
sprinklers in the shade, homemade popsicles, and ice with salt.  No one was out
on the street.
  
	Lisa slipped out the side door, carefully shutting it with the smallest
click.  Barefoot and on tiptoe, she crept across the yard.  Over the wind of 
the swamp cooler and the cicada’s buzz, the tiny sounds would be lost, but her 
mother had mother’s ears.  Ears that could hear a sound as small as the 
miniscule snick of a lizard’s tongue lapping up ants two blocks away, if that 
sound meant that Lisa had done anything, which was always something bad.  Out 
of the yard, adrenaline pumping, her calloused, barefeet barely touched the 
ground as she ran down the street, detouring into the bits and pieces of shade 
for temporary relief.

	At the same time, Alice popped open her own front door and slammed it 
behind.  Everyone was in the backyard with the slipn’slide. She ran toward the 
desert singing a joyous “California Girls” as her dirty white Keds flew down 
the sidewalk.  As she neared the desert’s edge, her voice was lost against the 
cicadas love call.  She stopped singing, checked over her shoulder to make 
sure she wasn’t being followed and put a renewed effort into the run, her hair 
and swimsuit drying off in the dry wind.

	Separately, the two girls ran to meet at the path through the acacias 
and mesquites, their bellies tightened in anticipation and their feet slapped 
the dust in time to the cicada beat.  First by seconds, Lisa waited, scanning 
the desert and dancing her burning feet in the dust.  Alice laughed in greeting.
Together, they flashed a secret smile, touched hands, finger tips to finger 
tips and glanced around.  No one was there, no one would be on a 103 day like 
this.
  
	Lisa led the way between the trees to the arroyo.  Together they leaped
the five feet to the soft, shaded sand below.  They ripped off their clothes 
and flopped spread-eagle, watched the summer’s almost leafless branches twist 
and slide in the wind, and they caught their breath.  A soundless breeze flowed
down the arroyo bed, goosefleshing their skin with evaporation.  Fingers groped
across the sand to clasp hands and at the touch, their hearts raced and they 
shivered in the heat.

	The temperature outside of the arroyo crossed the 104 mark.  The pitch 
and beat of the cicada song rose, quickened and rolled across the desert - a 
seemingly endless monotony of excitement, increased by the heat and the 
looming, inevitable rain – the end of their season.

	Alice hummed a descant that no one could hear.  Lisa rose up on her 
elbow.  Her forefinger slowly traced the edge of Alice’s jaw and then slid down
to her clavicle.  As Alice kissed her, they rolled back onto the sand.  

Kathleen Speck
08/01/09