One
Somewhere around midnight, Wallace McFerguson bolted
upright in bed. Dreams vanished like cobwebs bursting into flame. Eyes
wide to the night, his heart racing and stomach knotting, he was hearing
Arabian flutes and the counter beat of soft finger chimes drifting through
the night. Eighteen-year-old Sasha Shahar Abdul had her father's scratchy
records going again, and he knew with every fiber of his being what that
meant.
He rolled to feet and on wobbling knees and threw the
curtains open wide to the summer darkness. If her curtains were closed,
he would die. The frustration of unrequited passion would be the death of
him yet. Across two well-tended lawns and the five-foot chain-link fence
that separated them, through the sparse vegetation of a sapling ash, a
square of warm light from an upstairs bedroom glowed in the midnight
void. Within, a slender pink body whirled and bobbed. Sasha held her
arms high and worked her finger chimes in time to the exotic beat of the
Arabian music. Her body undulated with wild abandon and unbelievable
grace.
"Oh, my God, she's naked!"
Wallace's heart palpitated. His knees all but
buckled. Lust knotted his gut with unbearable intensity. At any cost, at
any risk, he had to get closer. He could see nothing but an enticing blur
at this distance.
He threw on his denims, a T-shirt and sneakers and
clambered out the window of his attic room. He froze motionless and
waited with baited breath for Aunt Bernice to respond to the disturbance
from her room below. Hearing nothing, he ran along the edge of the gutter
and leaped a yard of yawning emptiness to the platform of his childhood
tree house.
He tore his T-shirt racing down the ladder and
snagged his blue jeans catapulting himself over the low chain link fence.
It was with utter dismay that he approached the twenty foot sapling rising
directly in front of Sasha's bedroom window. The little tree barely
reached the eaves of the house. Did he seriously expect to climb the
oversized twig supported by three wires staked to the lawn?
He had no choice but to try.
He shimmied up the trunk and paused as the sapling
swayed. One of the wire stakes pulled loose in a gout of black earth. He
looked up longingly at Sasha's window no more than another five feet
overhead. All thought of caution evaporated as the girl whirled her body
into view and then vanished. He would rather die than turn back now.
He climbed another few feet. The sapling leaned. It
leaned the wrong way. Grunting with effort, Wallace rocked to and fro and
sent the tree careening in the right direction, moving him directly into
the light of the window.
What he saw stunned him, and then utterly entranced
him. The orange glow of the lamp on Sasha's dresser played tag with
flowing shadow across every subtle contour of muscle and bone of her lean
body. She moved as gracefully as a ballerina even when she walked, but
when she danced, she became a pirouetting angel.
Frustration gnawed at him in this perfect moment of
awe and wonder. It shouldn't have to end like this. He wanted so badly
to touch.
"Wallace McFerguson, what in the name of Allah are
you doing up there?"
The voice was soft and calm and coming from somewhere
below. Wallace looked down in utter horror.
Sasha's mother stood at the base of the tree with her
hands on her shapely hips. Sylvia Carleton-Abdul yanked on one of the two
surviving support wires. "Wallace, you little pervert, you come down here
this very instant!"
"No, don't do that!"
One of two surviving stakes pulled loose from the
ground. The tree toppled, tearing delicate roots with a crackling sound.
Slowly, Wallace's weight bore the sapling to the ground. He lost his grip
and fell the last few feet with a shriek. Impact knocked the wind from
his lungs.
"Sasha, pull your blinds this very instant!"
Sasha stuck her head out the window, her voice
echoing throughout the neighborhood. "Mother, I need an audience to do my
best! You said so yourself!"
"This is not what I had in mind!”
Sasha's blinds snapped shut. Wallace rolled over and
pushed himself onto his hands and knees, hoping for the opportunity to
crawl into the darkness unnoticed. Sylvia hooked a finger in his belt and
hauled him effortlessly to his feet.
"Wallace, really."
The compassion in her voice quelled his rising
panic.
Aunt Bernice reignited it. "Sylvia, you godless
harlot!" she screamed from her bedroom window across the dark lawns. "Let
go of my boy in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ!"
Sylvia sighed in despair. "Bad boy, Wallace. Now
look at the trouble you've caused. Go home."
She launched him toward his own house with a
humiliating pat on the butt. No part of his anatomy had been
incapacitated by the fall, but on a psychological level, he had been
destroyed.
Wallace pointedly ignored Aunt Bernice's strident cry
and turned instead into the shelter of the dark woods out back within
which to bury his shame, vowing from the depth of his mortification never
to return.
