Nineteen

Nineteen by Kristen Liesch

One hand on the wheel, eyes closed, shouldn’t be closed, but the sunshine weighs on my lashes. My other hand drums a beat as it hangs out my window. It’s cold enough to turn my fingernail blue, and cold enough to chill my toes and set my leg-hairs all a-prickle but there’s the sunshine. Hello sunshine. And they said on the radio that we’re expecting nineteen for the high tomorrow. I open my eyes wide and just in time to brake too hard and say nineteen out loud enough for the guy in the car next to me to turn his head and snicker. Nineteen and now I’m flying high at the red light, parked behind the little yellow bus.
A relic of a woman is crossing the street. She’s bent over as though she spent her whole life watching her feet, and she’s only half the way across when she’s found herself in the middle of impatient morning traffic with a green light. She pauses and reaches out a leathery grey hand to match the leathery grey jacket that casts her thin shadow. I try to will the bee-line of cars next me to Halt! But her hand does the trick and with a hop, skip, and a hobble, she’s across.
I take off just as the light turns yellow and reminds me of the sunshine and that I can expect a high of nineteen tomorrow.
My morning drive makes way for an emerging coincidence: red lights and old ladies. This one might not be old, but it seems as though she’s lived long enough to abandon whatever made her unhappy in life. She’s wearing a bright green bandana, waving Hello sunshine in the breeze. And the baby she balances on her hip lets out a Ma-ma Ma-ma and waves its plastic fingers at the stream of business-casual crazies driving by.
I’m jealous of the plastic handled clear nylon bag clutched in her pudgy fist. Crayons and a newspaper are her must-haves and I want to trade her for my textbook and the responsibility hiding inside my wallet, and the work clothes hanging in the back, and the honk,…the honk. It’s coming from behind and I’m off. Bastard can’t enjoy an extra second of sunshiny silence. He’s got somewhere to be. Has he heard about the expected high? He’s on that wireless, car-friendly phone that makes him self-conscious because he’s well aware that it looks like he’s talking to himself. Him and the man on the corner. They have more in common than either would like to admit. He—Frank, Joe, Sylvestre, Bruce—leans against the lamppost and looks too hot in his too heavy jacket. And I wonder. I wonder what he does with it when the expected high is nineteen. I’ve never heard of a storage unit for the down-and-out who need to downsize for the summer. Here, hold this for me, I’ll be back for it in September. Until then, adios and enjoy the high. Maybe he’ll give it back to Goodwill where he’ll be sure to find it in a few months. Where he’ll be sure to grumble about the need for a better system when he forks over the three-fifty to buy back his jacket in September.
Now my honk count is up to two and I scoot my way down the road and smile at the emphatic gesture coming from the driver passing me. Because it’s too nice outside to begin the day with furrowed brows and bitter complicity.
Learning is where it’s at. Two more weeks of it until the doors burst open and floods of brain-dead students rush toward summer to counteract the academic efforts with sunshine and booze. Brain-dead to brain-damage thanks to the forecast high.
Nothing will ever be the same. I want to believe it because it’s so convincing. Like a full moon or an eclipse or a war or an election—people go funny over sunshine.
A man walking the sidewalk stops in his tracks and sees something that’s been buried under eight months of snow. A rock. A big one. The kind of rock with a plaque on it that tells the history of the building across the street. He puts his booted foot on the rock and becomes Columbus, shading his eyes with his hand, he gazes at the monument of Albertan architecture. Like all historic buildings, they’ll be affordable housing in a hundred years, if they don’t burn down first. Funny. Funny like the bike the bearded man rides. Like he’s leaning back in his race-car. Vroom vroom. I imagine him falling over and bursting into flames. Mother Nature mistook him for a motorist, and for once decided to get her revenge. Oops. Instead, he pedals across while the real motorists beg Big Momma to spare them again, please. At least until after that eight o’clock board meeting.
I’m across the bridge and late for class, but I can’t help but smile because it has just begun. Soon I’m walking with a shimmy in my step, remnants of a belly-dancing class mixed with the Jack Johnson plugged in my ears that makes my world a musical. He sings “banana pancakes,” and “the mess he made.” I smile, smile at everything: water-coloured, once-bright candies in a clump in the dusty-muddy-grassy mush that once was a lawn. Before the snow fell and covered the green and the garbage that comes back now to haunt the littering fool who thought that Jack Frost would take care of the mess. But it’s all part of the expected high that expects rollerbladers, cyclists, skateboarders, then sends out the mini-tractors to kick up dust in the midnight black by the light of two mechanical, electrical eyes.
For now, I kick the rubble and smile. I walk tall, just in case the twigs above me might want to reach down and tangle themselves in my hair. I’d hardly mind. I smile at the few blades of grass peeking out asking the forecast temperature. Nineteen, I’m happy to whisper before flaring my little nostrils and breathing deep all the smells—nasty and otherwise—into my lungs that scream It must be spring.
I sit down beside a friend and realize I’m really late for class, but the view from his window bench makes me forget. I smile and tell him about the old ladies and the man and the drivers and the cyclist and the candies and tell him about the forecast high. Nineteen, he repeats, and slaps his hand on my thigh and we laugh because it’s only begun.