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Front Porch Nonfiction
- Cheboygan by Kerry Muir
I am wearing a red dress, standing at the edge of the lake that borders Cheboygan. Shivering, just a little, because I did not bring a sweater. I am staring up at a black clear sky filled with fireworks and lights. A man has his arms around me. He stands behind me. I am too short for him, or he is too tall for me, so he has to stoop down to hug me from behind. I have known him three days. We have had sex on the carpeted floor of his apartment only once, when I was so dead blind drunk I couldn’t even hold up my own head. But other than that, I have been a perfect lady. The lake is black and shiny, like an oil slick with green and pink confetti ribbons of fireworks reflected in its black water, reflected back up at the sky. There are shooting stars, too, and constellations—Big Dipper, Little Dipper, Orion, The North Star. The Milky Way. And Venus. On the way over here, driving his maroon Monte Carlo, he had said to me, Last year a rocket went off by accident into the crowd and injured a bunch of kids real bad. So naturally, I am just a little nervous, just ever so stiff in my red dress, watching the fireworks go Boom! Bam! Poom!! while this man, this tall man with the baritone voice, places his arms around me, pulls me into his body.
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