IT STARTS LIKE THIS:
She’s twenty-three again, and that’s the magic, she knows the exact year, feels it in the way her skin presses tight against braless breasts, knee and hip joints smooth, no clicking or catching as she flows down the splintery steps of that funky old cottage in the cedar grove. Her bare toes grip the rough boards, savor the moist grass for the sheer pleasure of being alive. She throws out her arms and spins across the yard, embroidered long skirt wheeling out about her legs. The sun winks on off on, striping down through the branches.
A deep chuckle. He stands straddling his bicycle, flashing a white grin as she slows, steps forward, squints against the man splitting sun rays. He shifts, summer sunlight streaming over him, and he’s all golden—tanned and shirtless in ragged cutoff jeans and a strand of hippie beads, long blond hair shimmering.
Lindsey looks down and now she’s naked standing there. She’s all sun-gold, too, her breasts perfect round and smooth and she looks up, he’s naked, beckoning, wow she’s floating and she knows it’s a dream then.
She’s back all those years behind him on his bike and they’re flying fast down the hill. His hair streams out longer and longer with the wind of their flight, twining through her own tawny locks, and she laughs. Long flaxen hair sprouting, curling, twining into psychedelic paisley swirls and birds are nesting in the profusion, a home for the honey bees, the Wonder of their Hair! But then the strands whip out tangling in the bushes, and she’s yanked backwards from the bicycle as he flies on solo.
Lindsey lands on her bare feet flinching at gritty linoleum. She’s walking down a long hospital hallway of gray doors and glaring white walls. She shivers, tries to wrap her hair around her nakedness but it’s only long enough now to barely cover her breasts, the one withered. She’s ashamed and hunches as the first door swings open.
“Washed-up.” Her ex Nick’s head pops out of the doorway, Jack-in-the-box on a hinged extensor, dark hair a polished cap.
Lindsey tries to run, but her feet are too heavy.
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