Reflections: white kisses, soft, pale, pink to pink, encapsulated behind glass; snow drifts mounted like lovers, smooth to the eye and cold to the touch. As a fresh snow began to fall, Mel found herself inside a small town blanketed in snow, slush strewn streets, curb sides flaky brown like pie crust, cars passing churning up slush. She crossed the intersection of Chelsey and Vine, imagining the snow as a great shower of tiny plummeting angels, dancing and spiraling down to die and reincarnate into their next lives.
That day, work had let out early, affording her the option to nestle into her favorite corner booth in The Second Cup to enjoy a good book. She would wait there for Dory to finish her shift. A rambunctious, dark eyed beauty with a tattoo around her right wrist, Dory was Mel's carnival come back to town; exciting, fragrant, brash and amusing. She looked up as soon as she'd heard the bell over the entrance ring. Her brown eyes smiled when she saw Mel stroll in, but they didn't linger. She quickly averted her gaze, glanced at the few faces of that morning's regulars, and then went back to starting another pot of house roast.
Mel went to her corner booth by the window and slid into her seat. Absently, she fished through her back pack and watched the snow whirl and drift and obscure the slow traffic and the carefully treading parents with their snow day children trailing behind them. Presently, Dory arrived at the table, set down a mug and proceeded to pour her secret lady fair a share of piping hot French roast. There was little exchanged between them; beyond a few knowing smiles and playfully furtive glances. Nodding her thanks, it was Mel that finally spoke, timidly asking as to whether she might be brought a blueberry scone.
Mel had imagined their mutual fondness as a crystal ball between them; their gazing eyes and dancing fingers conjuring what magic they could before each time they had to cover their secret again with the black silk of discretion. Their home town, a hamlet nestled between two foothills skirting the east face of the Rockies, was too small for the honesty of their feelings and too crowded with the prying myopic eyes of inflexible convention and the conservatism of evangelized generations.
Mel didn't watch as the other departed for the back of the counter. Instead, she brought her vision to bear on the search for what she wanted to read by the soft gray light of the snowy sky beyond the shop's window. Her green knitted hat still on her head, she withdrew her latest favorite book, cracked it open and curled up in her little corner of the coffee shop's big front window. Mel had lost herself almost immediately among a village of thatched huts in a remote African jungle, dense with lush flora; a proud white man, his wife and four daughters standing beside him, preaching to a gathered mass of naked tribes people; their eyes glazed dumbly with astonishment and doubt.
Mel loved to lose herself in a good story, to give herself up to the all be it temporary but godly sweet escape of it. Of course there were other, more deliciously tangible escapes, fleeting flights of clandestine interludes with Dory that certainly were just as temporary, yet so much more deliciously stimulating. But, they only left Mel hungering for more; leading her past page after page, tempting her with the juicier parts, only to find them written in snap shot bits of haiku and flash verse.
The two young women could only imagined having the freedom to drink as deeply of each other as they could swallow. Escape, as from most prisons, was easier said than done. Small towns like Bear Lake had their degrees of barricade; from the invisible bars and chains of familial love to the strong gravity of self-imposed fear of failing or suffering alone beyond its borders.
You know the score Melody May, she'd told herself. Do you really want to be the selfish sort of person that disappoints her family for the sake of being true to herself? Would it really be so bad to settle for going to college in the next big town over, earn your degree and come back home to maintain your disguise while you pay off your student loans over the course of the rest of your life because the average income in this part of the country makes it so that it takes that long? Right now, your only consolation, for what its worth, is that even a life sentence is temporary. So just take the ride Mel. Everything; is temporary.
She sighed and turned the page before breaking off another chunk of scone and popping it daintily into her mouth. Briefly, she glanced at Dory; her eyes betraying hope and longing. Dory glanced back, and then looked up at the wall clock above the bar. An hour and a half more, and they would meet outside and take the long way home together.
The two young women had grown up, neighbors living a block apart, forging their friendship through their years in grade school, and as Girl Scouts. They'd developed the harmony of their voices as they sung their Girl Scout songs in the basements of local churches and around camp fires, were together for every cookie campaign and earned badge after badge together. They'd even gone as far as becoming cadets together, eager to join the ranks of scout leaders.
But, school had gotten harder and more time consuming, and new friends had gradually caused Girl Scouts to be less interesting and much less socially acceptable for them both. Mel had hung on a while longer and was on the cusp of becoming a Girl Scout Senior when Dory stopped by her house one day after nearly a year's absence to show her new tattoo; a stylized bracelet of thorny vines wrapped around her right wrist.
They were seventeen at the time. Mel, five years into the certainty of her orientation, as sure that she was that having Dory as a girlfriend would be nice, still feared too greatly to take the risk of finding out whether such a thing could happen. Then there she was, over a year passed without having seen her, pretty in her tough way, eyes sparkling, daring, just as loud mouthed as she ever was, and now with a tattoo of all things. Perhaps, Mel had thought, there was a chance.
Their friendship renewed; Mel's sexuality continued to blossom in the silence of her heart while Dory's evolution happened in emotional fits and starts. She was weary of their sleepy, conservative, little town, ranted freely about the local social and religious orthodoxies and started smoking a little pot. Mel didn't approve, but didn't feel it was worth condemning her for. In time, possessed by the allure of Dory's boldness and her reporting of cannabis's effects, Mel asked to try it out.
It was the height of summer. Mel had just turned nineteen. Dory had finally earned enough money to buy her first car; a beat to shit little Honda. She'd told Mel to dress warmly because she was going to drive them up to the top of Rocky Mountain National for her birthday, an elevation of twenty thousand feet. A mile after having passed the park ranger's booth, Dory lighted the joint and handed it to Mel. She advised her to just take two puffs and then wait the feeling out. By fourteen thousand feet, the temperature outside of the car had dropped thirty degrees. Mel knew it would be so, no stranger to the rules of altitude, but she could still hardly restrain the joyous laughter over the fact that she'd traveled from July to January in the matter of half an hour.
After another twenty minutes, they'd passed the sign that said that they'd arrived at twenty thousand feet. Dory coasted to the side of the road and cut the engine. Mel stared wide eyed and slack jawed out the passenger window. The scene was desolate, like a craterless moonscape, cluttered with crags and boulders, strewn with the rubble of elapsed eons. She found it uncompromisingly beautiful in all its sheer, ancient, factuality. I've lived my whole life only an hour away from here, she thought. I, I just can't believe it. Mel turned to face Dory. Her hair was bound up inside a baseball cap, her face flawless, and her eyes warm and smiling.
Putting on their winter coats, they stepped out of the vehicle. Dory leaned against the car and rekindled the joint. Mel took another puff, was advised to walk slowly or else she might pass out from the high and the height, and then stepped off into the terrain. The temperature wasn't any more than twenty-six degrees as she strode across the remnants of some of the most ancient rocks in the park. She took in the marbled gray, white, and black bands of minerals in granular streaky gneiss and darker, finer grained schist. Interspersed in piles and heaps were silver plume granite, distinctive in its gray-tan and pink-red.
"It takes something like this to show you just how small we really are." said Dory as she climbed upon a large outcropping of the silver granite.
Mel had been too mesmerized by the sun sparkled flecks of feldspar crystals along the granite slab by her feet to notice Dory's having mounted the great stone beyond her.
"But I'd still bet," Dory continued, "That even if you brought every last corporate criminal and creationist proponent up here to face their own arrogance, ninety percent of them would never change a single thing about how they rape the planet or what lies they tell their flocks."
Mel looked up and regarded her friend. Dory was staring toward the northwest, her cheeks pink, and her eyes squinting from the wind. She suddenly wanted to shout at her: Dum ass; why don't you stop getting high and go out into the world and follow your convictions and do something about it if you think it sucks so bad? But, she didn't. She wouldn't because she couldn't. Her own ambition was little more than getting up every day, going to work, collecting her meager pay check and living the rest of her life out through the passive vicariousness of reading. Still eyeing Dory, Mel felt a sudden twinge in her sex, and then decided to mount the huge boulder upon which her friend stood.
"Dude!" cried Dory as she struggled to keep her footing, "Are you high? Careful!"
Dory turned around to help Mel achieve balance on the small flat area available for them both to stand on.
"Well; yeah!" answered Mel; starting to laugh and shriek as she lowered herself to a safe place to sit, "We're probably now; what, like twenty-eight thousand feet high?"
They giggled for a time; their laughter ringing in sputters and snorts, before they eventually calmed down and resumed quietly staring out across the top of the country.
"Is this when I'm supposed to start being hungry?" Mel asked, "Because I am. Are your eye balls pulsing? My eye balls are pulsing. God, I'm so loud inside my head. We need music. We need food and music."
"Sing for us then." Dory suggested, she too now sitting.
