Elegans Rubra Veste
I’ve thought about that semester almost daily since I walked into my first Latin class, and plunked my fourteen-year-old self in the front row. I don’t remember if the seating was assigned, or I chose it. Either way, it was a mistake.
Here’s what I do remember.
Eisenhower was President. Football helmets were still made of leather - facemasks non-existent. Air conditioning was rare. During warm days, school windows were wide open; and, if you were lucky, your classroom had a fan. It was a time of tucked-in shirts, penny loafers, petticoats, slips, Mary Janes with flat heels, the color red.
And, it was the semester I learned no Latin.
It was also the semester I remained in an unrelieved, heated fog after I first glimpsed flesh that embodies every photograph stared at for years and every bedsheet wiped dry. It was the semester the evening haze of San Francisco surrounded me and would live inside me for the rest of my life.
It was the semester every part of my body grew during those fifty minute periods, Monday through Friday, just after lunch.
On that first day, her supple hips gracefully slanted as she molded herself into and under the school desk. Her legs seemed to separate and cross of their own volition.
She sat in the center aisle at the back desk against the wall. Or, more precisely, languidly reclined wearing what I remember as an elegant red dress that compressed like a sheath. The scooped neckline lingered just off her shoulders, The skirt tapered slowly down her thighs and calves, narrowed, then stopped four inches below her knees.
Her eyes were a crackling blue, her smooth, clear face surrounded by ample black hair and a skin that appeared as a perpetual tan. Her voice sounded at home with Latin.
Five days a week I lingered in that misty stupor. I don’t remember breathing the entire semester.
On that last day, when the bell rang, I inhaled.
I can’t remember her name, and she never looked at me.
Thomas Elson’s stories appear in numerous venues, including Ellipsis, Better Than Starbucks, Bull, Cabinet of Heed, Flash Frontier, El Portal, Ginosko, Short Édition, North Dakota Quarterly, Journal of Expressive Writing, Dead Mule School, Selkie, New Ulster, Lampeter, and Adelaide. He divides his time between Northern California and Western Kansas.