A Few Fraudulent Days

An honest July afternoon

July launched an endless shower, as every true Alaskan July should, but this week deviously ushered in light clouds and blue sunshine. As my marathon training carried me through the Anchorage trails, my plodding feet surged in heat, even in the shade of the trees and soft ground. When I came upon a lake filled with splashing children and merry water, my feet decisively guided my steaming body to the edge of the pool. I must get new shoes, I thought, as—eager for the cool water—I hurriedly removed my shoes, shedding disintegrating stuffing with my left ankle and catching my right heel on a gaping hole where the lining had ripped.
I ran home briskly, unconcerned by the soaking, clinging shorts and the T-shirt which had stretched from an S to an XL.

Jumping pictures in Girdwood: fail

There is a fire-escape outside my room. I call it my balcony though it's hardly wide or comfortable enough to sit on. For the next half hour it gathered the afternoon sunshine around my drying, worked body. I wasn't the only one caught between an eagerness for sunshine and a desire for cool. Across the green, I lazily noticed a man in his third floor apartment. He stood confidently in the wide doorway. He would have appeared naked but that his belly wasn't quite large enough to completely hide his white Hanes which peeked sharply from beneath a slowed metabolism and a few too many beers. He suddenly noticed me but pretending not to, made a casual scramble to the cover of the window. I tried not to laugh and carried on with my quiet joy.