Susan Senator

She could not stop smiling. Her face was so warm, she was inside-her-own-face warm. “Nobody rises” they were singing in the background. His voice was like smooth terracotta, round, earthy, just so right. They were all harmonizing yellow, again, just right. A springtime of yellow. The new shoots from the ground were her friends, she’d kind of just made them, the friends. It was no effort. She had only experienced that one other time, and that was with Him. The sweetness of it, sun-warmed chocolate, back-of-your-tongue thick.

These people, each better than the next, and all the next and before, so so so beautiful. They make music out of the smokey air of winter Cape. Smokey but no one’s lit a fire. Why does it smell like a fireplace? No one knows. She had stumbled into a whole garden here. Every favorite flower in there.

She was just softly happy. Summertime in January, pink and plump and sweet.