struggling to keep up

struggling to keep up

fiction
edward w pritchard

One gets used to the terrain  around the familiar landscape they inhabit; who ever notices which way small streams of water curve and flow as water follows the roads down the sloping inclines we drive on everyday. Today the direction of the crashing waters was crucial for these were unprecedented floods and the comfortable small hills sloping here and there in gentle descent that I drove on everyday to work as I went about my life threatened to drown everyone or at least destroy the comfortable lives we had become accustomed to. For two days it had been raining and floods threaten to destroy our small City. Many homes were already destroyed by the flood waters. Several small streams barely noticeable usually were now awe inflicting as they ruthlessly rushed down the slope of the local landscape.  

I was struggling to keep up with Marion . We were running along the steep roads behind the Crystal Bowl, the old stadium near our small home, that had been the backdrop and center of our world as we had went about shopping, meeting and courting, and now splitting up. Our relationship was in turmoil  but it wasn't until these extended rain storm that I realized that things were over between us.

As she ran along Marion seemed a stranger. She wasn't listening to my suggestions about where to head for safety and she seemed to follow her own secret agenda. Dashing waters from the floods destroyed the cherished edifices of our friends and family uprooting trees and landscapes but Marion seemed oblivious. Her intensity of purpose allowed no sentiment or thought to anything except to run toward her secret location.

The rain had slowed to a drizzle and I had dodged the worst of the cascading flood waters. I had become separated from Marion near the top of the hills behind the old stadium as she ran along at ten miles per hour. I couldn't keep up and I slowed to my own pace and leisurely looked for a place of sanctuary to wait out the rain storms.

I wound up at the local sports bar a pleasant twenty minute drive from my house under normal conditions. It was open, business was as usual several sports games were on the big screen TV's and the atmosphere was loud and pleasant with locals waiting out the storms. As I ate my dinner and had a few beers I watched a middle aged woman in a booth about thirty feet away. I couldn't help it she was directly in front of me. The man she sat next to was partially shielded from view.

The woman was struggling to be a lady as the man she was sitting with put his hands up and down her ass and lower back as she ate her meal. She delicately sipped a glass of wine. The woman was dark red headed and pretty in a faded way. I tried to look else where but  I watched as she delicately crossed her legs and put her hand protectively into her lap.

I finished my meal and walked to the front to pay walking right next to the delicate red headed lady. The man next to her was looking away, he was groping the woman to his left. It was my Marion and as I walked by I noticed Marion had her legs crossed in a ladylike fashion and her right hand delicately in her lap as the man between the two women continued to grope them as he burped down his beer.