Page 116 of Possibly Texas

I shrugged. “We.”

His smile turned into a grin.

“Speaking of which,” I leaned in to whisper, “I solved the Shirlene mystery.”

“Oh?”

“I think the letters are going to stop. I could tell you all about it sometime,” I said, averting my eyes from his. “If you want?”

Auggie took a while to think about what I’d offered, and I was beginning to worry that he might tell me to go jump off a pier. Or a certain bridge. Finally, he spoke.

“It’s a full moon tomorrow night,” he said. “I was going to give the silo one more chance. It won’t be great for star watching, but the moon should be amazing. And maybe the stars will look good, too. Do you…do you want to try again?”

I grinned down at the floor before raising my head to look at him.

“I’d love to try again,” I said.

“Eleven-thirty?” he asked. “Just like always? Or the once?”

I laughed. “I’ll be there.”

Auggie and I left Starbuck’s together, but went in separate directions after exiting the shop. He headed off to his barn, and I headed to Jack’s place. Home. My first real home in so long that I couldn’t even remember.

Later that night, as had become habit, I stripped down to my boxers and crawled into bed. I knelt by the dormer window and pushed it open. The Possibilian breeze whispered into my room, delivering the sounds and smells of town, cool enough to summon gooseflesh to my chest and arms, as grasshoppers chirped in the distance and fireflies danced along the bank of Susurrus Creek.

It had only been dark for an hour, but I could hear indecipherable music on the wind, coming from the direction of Auggie’s barn. Where lights were already coming from the skylight.

I couldn’t wait to try again.

If life was art, and art wasn’t easy, sometimes you just had to keep trying.

Because art doesn’t come naturally to all of us, after all.

As I drifted off to sleep, it felt as if I was drifting away into a black void. Then the light came, burning away the void, and a scene unfolded of an evergreen valley where cool breezes whispered through tree leaves and made the grass perpetually dance. Dew drops shone like gemstones on blades of grass and flower petals and tree leaves. Where chrysalides, stuck to hearty plant stems split open, saturating the earth with their nutrients and butterflies emerged, shaking off their wings, heavy with moisture.

The butterflies, unsure of what the purpose of their transformation was, flapped their wings lazily, drying them as the sun warmed and woke them from their weeks-long slumber. With nothing else to do, they took flight. Because that’s what butterflies do. Not because there was nothing else to do, but because they could. It didn’t have to make sense, but flight was how they announced their new way of being.

It was how they announced that, though changed, they were still there.

Just different.

Somewhere, in my dream, I heard a door open and close.

“So,” I said coyly, “you and Sofia?”

Jack had been messing around with a new project, sizing it up, when I walked downstairs the next morning and found him in the backyard. When I walked up and spoke those four words to him, he looked up at me, and though his cheeks gave him away, he tried to look annoyed with me. I just grinned at him until he broke. Finally, a small smile played along his lips, and he knew he couldn’t hide it. Though, he tried to lower his head and go back to examining his new project.

The yard under my feet felt like a shag carpet, the grass soft and supple, the ground softened from the deluge we’d had. Rustling in the wind, my hair caught the soft, cool breeze the storm had brought back to town. The August sun overhead seemed muted by the cool earth underfoot and the breeze that had returned.

“I saw that.”

Jack swatted a hand at me.

“Are you…in looooooooove, Jack?”

He looked up at me, trying to appear angry, but he couldn’t keep that smile off of his face. The man had it bad.

“Is she your new squeeze, or what, man?” I asked.