JUNE

If you haven’t joined the Four Seasons community yet, what are you waiting for? Stories come once per month and it’s free. The following is an excerpt from June. Drop your email in the box at the bottom and get caught up with all six issues. The entire series will be assembled into a single story at the end of this year.

Enjoy!

Lemmin parted his lips, then closed them again.

“And if you have any hopes of that job of yours getting any better, well you can just keep dreaming, they’ve been putting out your fires since February.”

Lemmin swallowed hard at the memory. Not like it ever left, but vented through Sheryl it seemed to harbor a few extra barbs. January could have changed everything. He had come home that New Year’s almost jolly, swimming in the strongest deja vu he’d felt in more than half his own forever. He came home to see Sheryl sighing quietly under the sheets, went out running and came back an hour later to make her breakfast. They’d stared into each other’s eyes over pancakes, for maybe the first time in a year as she listened to his parade of promises. Everything would change he said, and she believed him. Every single word. And things had started to change, almost immediately, each great day falling right into a better one.

Until the unthinkable happened. It was the impossible that had opened a wound to the inevitable.

“Looks like the traffic’s making itself comfortable.” The words just sort of fell from Lemmin’s lips, directed at no one, except perhaps himself.

“You can’t just hand everyone a ticket.” Sheryl snorted the same snort he always hated yet seemed to almost miss when it wasn’t around. “Bet you miss that siren of yours right about now.”

Lemmin lifted his head to look at the overpass, as if an extra half inch would allow him to see past the hazy glare, through 100,000 tons of steel and into the tangled nucleus of whatever trouble was intent on turning his day from bad to worse. He saw nothing, but figured he could gas up, cross the tracks and grab the freeway a mile up, maybe leaping past the largest part of the gridlock.

A minute off the freeway, Lemmin spied a horse with wings jumping from the center of a faded blue circle, swore to himself that that particular brand of station had long since gone extinct, then flashed the blinker on the Mini Cooper and pulled up next to a washed out pump to fill his dying tank. “I’ll be right back,” he said. He didn’t look at Sheryl or invite her along.

The tinny ding as Lemmin entered the liquor store pulled his thoughts from Sheryl, though only for a second. Stepping behind a guy he probably could’ve smelled from outside, his mind drifted back to thirty years before and the constant thought that he’d always be alone. He spent an adolescence waiting for someone to ask him about the scar on his cheek or the one just above his eye. He practiced his answers in the mirror so they would sound polished when finally heard.

But nobody ever asked. Either nobody wanted to know or nobody wanted to be impolite. At least no one until Sheryl, curious as she was brash.

They had known one another for maybe five entire minutes before each was making promises neither one could keep, knowing they had just enough in common to keep things interesting. It was another good five years before her two main food groups turned to Slim Fast and Valium, and a decade before long intervals of regular silence papered their walls.

“What can I get you?”

…

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