Allie & Micah

Early evening’s indigo-stained fingers crept into the summer sky of a different world, years and an unquantifiable distance away from the bitter, old man. The sun’s last orange traces illuminated a playground in a meadow.

Micah, bored of drawing dinosaurs in the gravely sand, squinted up at the playground towers to see if the younger children were getting close to leaving yet, but they were still in the middle of a round of tag, squealing as they narrowly avoided each other on the metal structure. He waited patiently for them to finish and go home so that he could claim the little metal kingdom for himself and play on it undisturbed, but when tag ended, hide’n’seek began.

A cluster of parents, all acquainted and cozily suburban, stood by near the grassy rest area, conversing with each other and mostly unaware of their children’s games.

Micah gave the unfamiliar adults a wary glance and then stood, his legs aching from having been crouched so long. He eyed his bike leaning on one of the benches in the rest area, and then turned, facing the edge of the meadow where there ran a little creek, almost hidden by a thin line of trees and brush. In the midst of the foliage he saw an unnaturally vibrant shade of green.

He walked carefully toward the patch of color until he was close enough to see that it was a small girl crouched perfectly still by the creek, wearing a tank top in a shade of safety vest green that only a child could get away with.

Curious, he made his way into the line of trees to see what she was doing, trying to glimpse the object of her attention before she noticed him.

She was perched as close to the creek as she could get without actually being in the soft slick mud of its banks, using a thin stick to prod gently at something stuck in the muck.

Just as he was able to see that it was a large butterfly, she glanced up sharply at him and raised the stick defensively in a clumsy quarte parry, but of this he had no way of knowing. The boy showed his palms in a gesture of peace.

“This is mine,” she said, looking him square in the eye.

“I’m not going to take it,” he reassured her. When she lowered the stick a little, he approached slowly until he was able to crouch next to her. She kept wary green eyes on him.

Her limbs were hunkered in a way that accentuated their skinniness, but she was balanced perfectly on the balls of her feet in a way that seemed graceful.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“What is this?” she asked in return, her voice carrying an accent that was unfamiliar made no discernible impression on Micah’s young ears. She poked the unlucky butterfly again, watching it carefully for a reaction.

“A butterfly?” he responded with some incredulity, and then said, “You know it’s dead, right?”

”Aeli?” came a voice behind them back in the meadow. “We are going to leave soon.”

The girl stood, her head popping up over the short line of brush so that she was visible to the caller, a tall woman with sharp eyes who scanned the meadow for her charge.

The girl waved to her and turned back to the water banks, looking down at the still insect with vague sadness.

“My nanny says we are going soon,” she said to him absentmindedly, even though her eyes and thoughts seemed to be lingering elsewhere.

“Nanny? Are your mom and dad at work?”

“My parents are gone,” she replied, frowning.

“Oh,” was the only response he was able to muster for a second. He rose to his full height, which was a good deal taller than the girl. At this angle, he could see a red, twisting scar on her neck that disappeared into the green shirt.

“Do you live there?” he asked a moment later, pointing to the distant gated neighborhood from which the yuppies had descended like a flock of honking geese.

“No. Essie and me just came here.” She spun a shoe in the mud, suddenly bashful. She had no friends yet. “I will be here tomorrow, if I can.”

He smiled. Though he could not voice it, he liked that she was expressive, and she appeared completely sincere.

“I can bike here tomorrow; my brother works all week. Is your name Aeli?” he asked, trying to mimic the unusual way her nanny had pronounced it, Ay-lee.

She tilted her head in a slightly animal way, considering him with his tousled hair and excess of questions.

“My name is Allie,” she finally replied, with the firm emphasis on her preferred name. “You?”

“Micah.”

She paused for several seconds, and then smiled at him in a moment in which Micah may have subconsciously decided he would follow that smile straight into war. Years later, he would follow through.

“Mi-cah?” she echoed, her tongue lingering over the syllables, as if tasting the unfamiliarity of them before releasing them again as words.

“Micah?” Allie said again, and he snapped out of his reverie. “Hey. Pst. Stop spacing out.”

He looked down at his hand, almost surprised to see the flat, round stone gripped there, and gave a practiced wrist flick, sending the rock in a journey across the surface of the water in what started as a satisfying series of skips but sunk disappointingly on the fourth plunk.

“That sucked,” she remarked with a scowl. Her childhood accent had been almost entirely stripped by the twelve-and-some years since they had met, now hidden among more recognizable pronunciations and slang.

“Cause you’ve made anything over three today, right?” he tossed back, without real venom.

The playground of his memories had changed almost as much as they had: after a child’s tragic death in the creek eight years ago, the metal playplace had been torn down and the creek was dammed slightly upstream to make a small, still pond. The entirety of it had been fenced off. Still they visited, sneaking through a gap in the fence.

“Look, a frog!” Allie said, and chased the little amphibian along the pond’s edge, her hands cupped to try to capture it. Micah chuckled as she slipped in the slick mud, catching her balance by plunging her hands down into the thick, wet silt.

“Don’t you have enough warts?” He smirked.

“Oh, damn, Micah, have you ever seen this crazy rare fowl in the area? I think it’s called a Mud Bird,” she said, flipping him off with a muddy finger before leaning down to rinse her hands.

As she swished them in the pond water, he tried to look at her as if it had been years since he’d seen her, comparing her against the child Allie of his memories.

Her thin limbs and little girl angles had softened somewhat, though she hadn’t gained much in the way of height, and she remained petite (and slightly sensitive about it). Her features had once been easily overwhelmed by her big, lucid eyes, but her pixieish nose and expressive mouth helped balance them out.

Her looks were distinctive but only almost pretty in a way that a double-take could put to rest any initial romantic interest. It was hard to appraise her looks objectively sometimes, as it was difficult to look past the large blossom of scar tissue that blazed across her skin.

It started in a thin, white tendril on her neck under her left ear, and widened into a textured swathe that crossed most of her upper body. It was a burn scar, she had told him before, and she had had it since before they met and became fast friends on that dying summer day. She would never admit to the shame that she harbored over the mark, but the way she constantly wore her strawberry curls over one shoulder to cover it revealed her feelings whether she wanted it to or not.

Here, with Micah, and at home, with Essie, she was comfortable enough to pull her hair back into a low, thick ponytail, exposing the scar.

Micah looked away from the long-healed wound as she stood to face him, wiping her hands on her jeans.

“Pretty sure the warts are an urban legend, and that’s for toads, anyway,” she replied, and then pulled a face at him. “Haven’t you ever watched the National Geographic channel?”

They sat in the grass looking over the pond, and fell into the comfortable silence of a pair that is used to each other’s presence.

Micah’s eyes rested unseeing on the glowing pond, and his thoughts were distant.

“Everything good?” Allie asked.

“Still feeling not so motivated lately,” he replied, calling back to a prior conversation. “I feel like I’m going through the motions and it’s all mechanical; go to class, go home, study, cook for Rex and me, go to bed, take a run, go to class…” he trailed off, feeling as though he was rambling.

She chewed her lip, leaning back onto her hands and watching the sun reflect on the pond’s gentle ripples.

“I feel you.”

“I thought once I started college, learning these things, that it would make me feel like I was contributing to something great, or even just something fulfilling. Then I thought that I’d feel that way next year, when I’ve learned more, and then again the next year… But here I am, three years in… I feel like medicine is taking more from me than I’m gaining from it.”

Her gaze was sympathetic, but she had no advice to offer, so she said nothing. She knew he just wanted to let the words loose from the corral of his thoughts, to ease their pacing like a lion in a cramped cage.

“Maybe it’s a thing where you feel it when you get there,” she said after a moment, and, realizing that was unhelpful, she added, “One day, you’ll be about to perform an operation, you’ll look down at the innocent face of a child, slack with anesthetic, and you’ll feel fulfilled.”

He laughed.

“You’re sick,” he said, then groaned, “It’s getting late.”

The sunset-soaked water cast a pinkish glow back on them.

“Thanks for coming out here with me,” she said, yawning and stretching. “That test today really kicked my ass.”

“Yeah, of course. I actually hafta head out for my date,” he replied as they walked toward the fence, ducked through the fence gap, and then made their way toward their vehicles, parked on the wide shoulder of the two-lane road that led out to the once-playground.

She snorted.

“Date,” she repeated, a little derisively, opening the door of her jeep -- a battered machine that she drove and loved much -- and slipping into the ripped driver’s seat, settling into the worn material of the seat that had all but molded to her body. “I don’t know if I would call what you do a date.”

It was Micah’s turn to scowl. “Ouch. Come on, I like Natalia.”

She blinked at him, turning over words in her head, choosing carefully among them. What she settled on was, “I’m sure you do. I don’t think it’s your feelings that are getting in the way, but that’s for you to pick apart.”

Micah closed the door after her, and then tapped his head in a knowing way.

“I’ll get to it eventually. You know, now, or maybe in the next couple years when it causes a lot of trouble and suddenly I’m forced to deal with it in a haphazard and painful way.”

“Don’t let her see your dark sense of humor yet. I’ve seen her around campus; she looks like watches cheesy romances and nurses injured baby birds back to health.” She smirked.

He took a deep breath, knowing that despite his joke, he was more than a little bothered by his habits. She had picked open an already well-picked scab of his that he would continue to mull over.

“See you tomorrow?”

“You bet,” he smiled back at her.