Stories | 2016

My neighbors girlfriend. I had seen my neighbors girlfriend around some, but we met at a small Bar-B-Que that I had invited him to. He and I work at the same place, but different shifts. We hang out ocasionally, and help each other when needed. She and I chatted quite a bit and hit it off. We had a pretty deep conversation, but nothing too intimate, so it was a suprise when she slipped me her phone number with a note to text her. I was suprised that she showed any interest in me, I am 54, tall and muscular from working all of my life, not particullary good looking, but not hideous either.

Though you wouldn’t know it to talk to her, if you paid attention, Jessica betrayed all the tell-tale signs of a military brat. She spoke with a vague Southern twang, the kind of dialect that only military generates and that all our grandfathers once spoke, decades ago when they were called up, before dispersing once more to home states and the clipped vowels of the mid-atlantic, the lazy Polish consonants of Chicago.