A last hot breath blew across the prairie, coloring garden tomatoes and heating the towns in a lustful haze.
The midwest seems always to be producing things. Corn, soybeans, hogs, steers, industrial pistons, hydraulic arms, scholars, literature. Everything springs up and travels out.
The young women were beautiful. Almost without exception. In pairs and alone catwalking the pavements of university towns. Gliding with the grace of items sliding down the checkout conveyor belt: a blushing mango, a glossy tube of tooth paste, a long-necked bottle of drain cleaner. (Label: Concentrated youth & beauty)
Some lose their allure when at rest and look tired as they sit to sip on cold drinks or smoke. Others carry a light wherever they go so that they seem to always be on stage, unable to shake the spotlight. The greatest among them move as tho on wheels of silk, pretending to a humility that heightens their glamor. It's as tho by giving away their good looks in the smallest of rations they're making it last, knowing the greater part is still in the bottle.
Jeans and t-shirts, ponytails, tennis shoes, perhaps foundation but never lipstick. Their speech is free of any place-holding 'ums.' Their tongues never once passing their teeth. They look you in the eye when they talk to you. And then you feel that you've had some glimpse thru the glass at the untapped reserve beneath - a shale formation of crude beauty under the already covetable sheen that overspreads the surface.
Who are these butter-fed beauties? How did the lumpen, potato-shaped generations preceding lead to this? Yet if the parents are any indication, the future is easy to see. Thirty and married, moderately happy careers, now with children, living in bright boxes set in squares of corn. Mid-life-midwest-midnight checkouts and Goodnight Moon. Aging like lollipops in reverse, thickening even as their candy-bright shells wear away.
The men, too, are beautiful. Muscular and vain, and in the last panting of summer, eager to show both. To show, perhaps, an unfortunate truth. That beauty is not trivial. Not at their age. Probably not in any.
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