It was like the way that cotton cloth falls, and in the falling makes a person wonder what's underneath.  The cloth is very light and if it falls and layers itself across a woman's figure it is because she has attracted it and the cloth clings to her for that attraction.

It was that way with Sarah and her long print dresses.  Perhaps, it being summer then, the intensity of the sessions at crew, two-persons pulling, then three, then a mixed five, perhaps in summer it was the toil of those sessions that never left her body and so the remainders of exertion, the humidity of her lithe limbs as they tried unsuccessfully to cool themselves, it was that empty dampness of summer that pulled her garments close along to her belly, her thighs, and snugly about her wide hips. It was something, that was for certain, something.

She could be seen, as Gorman often saw her, wearing the cotton dress with the tiny floral print against the dark brown, barely-visible background, even as she rode her bicycle down the high arched hills of Langdon, a tiny town with a great university at its heart.

Or perhaps he might sit and wait to catch sight of her going round the end of an aisle at the library, the low aisles of the reference section, the long end of the red print now tailing along after her, mid-calf, as if the last glimpse of a manta ray, diving down to the bottom of the open sea.

He could count the tiny roses, and often did, the ones on the small, angled armlets of the dress that went over her shoulders and slid underneath her arms, or the ones that alternately blosomed and then slept with each and every breath she took, snoozing now behind her desk -- the library could do that to a person.

Now and again braving a well-considered word to her face, hoping only for the smile of acceptance and a sign of the coy misunderstanding of intention, the air between them vast and unconquerable, the distance to the surface of the sun, and then to feel the gentle wash of scented wind that flowed from her hand-thrown hair hissing sweetly in the air, a mind-spun romance giving up its place to the pulsations of instinct and.

Years go by like that a day at a time. Time floats by, never really rushing or giving a clear view of its motive spirit or its headlong pace, but softly like the wave of the hem sewn at the bottom of a cotton dress, flipping now with flirtatious shyness and vitality to reveal its paler underside to sluggish eyes. See how it winks, like time compressing as seasons pass and years go by, like that.

Finally, the end of spring and Gorman's life, the one with Sarah at its core, went rising and crashing to its close. In the darkness of the thawing planet she was on fire before his slow roving eyes, a tiny point of black centered on her rounded chin. There is no distance nor cotton cloth between he and she, the gentle itch of woolen heat placed all around the lovers, pale and brown skinned microscopic beasts cocooned with one another against the eternal and savage forces of all time.

Showering lights and loss of elemental understanding of the limits of a person, where it ends or it begins, an end to coldness and the beginning of the end of warm, secure, and undiscovered heart.

She flutters in the way that cotton cloth has as a great expanse of it is drawn, unfettered through the wind, fluttering, not flapping or filling with the bulk of air, but fluttering, taking gentle and uncertain hold of the air, not pushing or pulling, but fluttering with subtle touch and careful caress, fluttering, like Gorman's heart, like the pulse at the heart of Gorman's life, the one with Sarah at its core, the one with Sarah in the town called Langdon, the small town with the arching hills, the one with the great university for a soul.

Her resting breath pauses then only to warm itself within her body and passes quietly back out, through silent nostrils, coursing a path towards his neck, unshaven with insouciant, lively youngness.  Her smile is of lowered eyelids and curvy buttocks naked beneath a flannel shirttail, and his is slick and sleazy with pride and affirmation of his confirmation, full of self and sin and goodness.

Then something takes it all back again and memory becomes redolent with the redundancy as no thing can find the trail thus blazed though much has set out in the same direction, armed with equal compass and mirrored destination; the path growing dimmer as the flag of life comes all the more sharply into view, flapping gently in a breeze, like a length of cotton cloth flowering, upside down, around and around and around. And that is what it felt like.
 
 
 
 
 

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