My neighbors have always been little old men. I watch them from my bedroom window. They putter in their gardens with their broad straw hats and hang their wives' plus-sized panties on the line, self-conscious about their womanish ways in full view of, let's be honest, a hot young thing like me. I'm a two-time Fitness Olympics Regionals champ. Each dawn I run a quick 15 K and I feel their eyes, the clouded eyes of little old men, early risers, sitting on their porches in the graying mists, parade-waving and nodding hello, admiring my sculpted abs and my firm, full breasts in my pink sports bra and my swishing, silky skort.

I allow some jiggle in the right places. I do this just for them. I warm the pockets of little old men. I thread their thumb-worn inseams. What else is in their day? They watch me in my driveway, cooling down, bending low to touch my trainers, fingering my dew-slick laces, pushing my glutes up to the sky, my signature moonrise.

Inside the houses of little old men, their wives grease skillets with bacon fat and slice daybreak into wedges of honeydew, yelling tasks from smoky kitchens, they won't even poke their curlers out.

So I make it a good stretch. I feel the burn.

Later, at my bedroom window I am back-lit, nude. I glisten. Night coughs through the yawning bedrooms of little old men, poor guys, and so, for them, I reach. I release. Let the yap-dogs rattle their chain-link fences. Let the hand-hemmed curtains part and close, part and close. My heat seeps into their faded coverlets and soaks their whiskered chins until I glow in the bones of those little old men like radium.


.

Rebecca Meacham's most recent collection of fiction is MORBID CURIOSITIES. She lives in Green Bay.

Read her postcard.

Detail of screenprint on main page from Roy Lichtenstein's "Sweet Dreams, Baby!" (1965).

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