Standing in Line at the Intersection

  Dean Wesley Smith

  Standing in Line at the Intersection

  Copyright © 2013 by Dean Wesley Smith

  Published by WMG Publishing

  Cover Design copyright © 2013 WMG Publishing

  Cover photo copyright © Elena Volkoya/Dreamstime

  Smashwords Edition

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  Today, Wednesday, the nineteenth day of July, the line of people at the intersection stretched only a few city blocks, back past the front door of the triplex theater showing reruns of HEAVEN CAN WAIT, IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE, and YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU.

  Harold Jones had decided to wear his best work suit, the one with the dark pinstripes, to stand in line. He had polished his shoes and combed his newly cut gray hair twice. He had left home to join the line at ten minutes after seven and ended up standing behind a beautiful and very nude young woman. She had dark skin, long dark hair, and a perfect all-over tan, plus a slight dimple in her left butt cheek.

  The big electric sign on the bank a block from the intersection read 78 degrees at two minutes before eight a.m.. Two short minutes before the traffic started and the line of people began to move. Those standing in line who wanted to talk complained about the heat. “Muggy,” they muttered to each other. Harold agreed and nodded his agreement to those he could hear muttering.

  Harold had decided to stand in line on a Wednesday because Wednesday symbolized the middle and nothing different at the same time. Every day people stood in the line. This particular Wednesday was a hot, muggy day in the city, but still a day just like any other in the fact that people stood in the line to step into the intersection. However today was different for Harold because he stood with them behind a naked woman with a slight dimple on her ass.

  As with every day, the people around Harold in line were all types and nationalities. Eighteen was the youngest, as was the law, but the oldest sometimes could barely walk. They were short, fat, thin, tall and almost every color of the rainbow. In other words, the line always seemed to be a basic cross-section of the human race.

  The people in the line dressed in everything from full suits to nothing at all, with a large majority choosing to stand in line in their bathrobes. A few dressed formal, figuring it would save time later, and a few stood nude, choosing that form of expression as a symbol of their lives.

  Harold and the beautiful naked woman were at least a block from the intersection, standing in front of a laundry called Mun Chings Dry Cleaning and Laundry Service. No matter how much Harold concentrated on what was going to happen at the intersection, no matter how hard he tried to look at the others in line, his gaze kept returning to the beautiful little dimple in the left cheek in front of him.

  Every time she moved, shifted her weight from one foot to the other, the dimple seemed to smile at him, talk to him. “You’re wasting your life,” it said. “Leave the line, call off the ex-brother-in-law, find a new job, a new wife. Most of all keep living.”

  The dimple on her ass said all of that to him every time she moved. She moved a lot and the dimple just kept right on talking.

  Of course, since his wife had left him a year before he had been constantly horny. He figured that might have had something to do with the lecture. But after a few minutes he discarded that theory and decided the dimple truly was speaking to him.

  For the first time the line eased slightly closer to the intersection and Harold noticed over the dimple lecture the squeal of brakes. Everyone in the line started to look and act a little more nervous. Harold took a deep breath and smiled, glad the waiting was almost over.

  Slowly, much slower than a wedding march, the line moved forward.

  Harold just kept staring at the dimple, listening to it lecture him like a young boy being scolded by his mother.

  Finally, while passing in front of a Taco John’s, he couldn’t take it any longer. He had to, in the final moments of his life, know the woman who owned that dimple.

  “Excuse me,” he said to the back of her dark hair.

  The dimple instantly shut up.

  She turned and smiled at Harold. She had a full, white-toothed grin, beautiful dark tanned skin, and almost no pubic hair. He took that all in at once before his gaze moved quickly back up to her deep brown eyes and colored eye shadow she wore.

  She smiled and nodded. “You like what you see?” she asked, holding her arms up in the classic look-at-me gesture.

  “Of course,” he said. “What human being wouldn’t like the perfection of another human body, especially one as proportioned as yours.”

  She appeared a little startled at his answer, letting her arms drop back to her sides. For the first time she seemed to look at him. Then her gaze moved down his front, taking in his suit, his shoes, his very stance on the hot sidewalk.

  “Corporate?”

  “Dressed like this,” this time it was his turn to hold his arms up in the look-at-me expression, “what else? Twenty-eight empty years with the same company, a failed marriage, and enough money so that money doesn’t matter any more.”

  She nodded. “Who gets the honor?”

  “My ex-brother-in-law,” Harold said. “He hated me more than anything else, mostly because he is a total failure in his life and too afraid and stupid to do anything about it. He’s using his beat up old pick-up, if he can keep it running long enough. I liked the symbolism of it.”

  She nodded again, obviously thinking deeply about what he had said. “Yes, that does have a nice feel to it. Failure meets success, with the winner being failure, of course, on both sides. Nice.”

  “Thank you,” Harold said, bowing slightly. “How about you?”

  “Love,” she said, matter-of-factly.

  Harold was actually puzzled. “Love?”

  She smiled and lightly touched his arm as they, and the line around them, moved up, their place on the sidewalk now less than a half block from the intersection. “I’m twenty-six, have had five boyfriends and two fiancées, all of whom were jerks. They only wanted me for this body.” She raised her arms again for a moment. “I left them all and now I can trust no man.”

  Harold nodded, thinking about what she had said. “So going out nude expresses your revulsion of every man’s inability to see beyond your body to the true you under the skin.”

  “Exactly,” she said. “It’s so nice you understand.”

  “So who is doing you?”

  “My younger sister. She has always been jealous of how I looked and how I always got the boys when she didn’t. I promised her all of my clothes and jewelry if she did the driving and she jumped at the chance. I don’t think I have ever seen her so happy.”

  The line moved forward and now there were less than twenty people between them and the intersection crosswalk. Up ahead a man wearing a pink bathrobe waited quietly for the walk light. When he got the green he stepped into the street, never looking to either side.

  As he neared the center of the crosswalk a huge pink Cadillac sped through the intersection and hit him right at the hood ornament. The crumbling, crunching, and thumping sound echoed down the block between the city buildings. The Cadillac did a four-wheel slide, coming to a stop near the body. The driver of the Cadillac was a woman and she was smiling and laughing.

  After a short pause, the cleanup crew ran into the street and Harold turned back to face the woman with the beautiful talking dimple on her butt.

  “Great, huh?” she asked, then turned to face the front of the line so that again Harold could stare at the indentation, the talking dent in her ass.

  But now it wasn’t saying a word.

  Two more people stepped into the intersection, were hit and killed, and the line moved up. Harold decided he couldn’t stand it any longer. He had to tell her what he was thinking. He had to clear his mind and his conscience before he could ever step into that road.

  “Excuse me,” he said again to the mass of dark hair that cascaded in perfect lines over her shoulders. She turned, this time smiling for real.

  “My name is Linda,” she said, extending her hand.

  “Harold.” Her skin felt soft and moist in his hand and she squeezed in a fondness-like way before she let go.

  Harold cleared his throat. “You know,” he said, taking his time while trying to gain his courage, “that you have a dimple on your butt.”

  She frowned at him. “I do? Where?” She tried to turn her head over her right shoulder so that she could see her own ass.

  “The other side,” Harold said. “Right there.” He pointed without touching, even though he really, really wanted to touch.

  “Wow,” she said, pulling her perfect skin on her ass around so that she could see the dimple. “I didn’t know that.”

  She and Harold both looked at the dimple on her ass for a moment, Harold expecting it to talk, but it didn’t.

  She let go of her butt and faced him. “Why did you tell me that at this moment?”

  Harold shrugged. “I’m not exactly sure. Your body is beautiful, but that indentation in your otherwise perfect skin became the focus for me earlier.” He de cided he didn’t want to tell her that her dimple had talked to him. Too much to explain in such a short time.

  “Go on,” she said, looking even more puzzled.

  “I think,” Harold said, doing his best to put his deepest and most private thoughts into words, “that the dimple, a flaw in such an otherwise perfect body, symbolized to me that the world is not a perfect place. I had always strived for the world to be perfect and for me to be one hundred percent successful in everything I ever did.”

  Harold shrugged. “When I wasn’t perfect, as I saw the world to be, I could no longer live in that perfect world.” He held his hand up at the line. “Thus this decision.”

  The look on her face seemed dazed, and for a moment Harold was afraid he had made her very angry, or even worse, made a fool of himself ten minutes before he was to die.

  “So,” she said, “the dimple on my ass is a symbol that the world is not a perfect place, and that symbol, my dimple, is giving you hope again?”

  Harold thought for a moment and then realized it was doing exactly that. Her dimple was giving him hope, giving him a reason to continue living. He smiled at her. “That’s right. And I think in a moment I will get out of the line.”

  Again she looked very thoughtful, then asked, “My imperfection is giving you a reason to live?”

  Harold nodded.

  “That’s wonderful. For the first time a man wants me for something besides my perfect figure, my perfect skin, my perfect teeth. For the first time a man wants me for something besides sex. I didn’t think that was possible.”

  “It is very much true and very much possible,” Harold said. “As I have just learned, it is not a perfect world, even when you have an almost perfect body such as yours.”

  “And,” she said, “as I have now learned, a man can want me for something besides my perfection.” She smiled and pulled her butt cheek around so she could see her dimple again. “My almost perfection.”

  Harold held out his hand for her. “I think we need to step out of line.”

  She glanced around and realized the clean-up crew was just finishing sweeping up a mechanic who had died with his tools in front of a plumbing truck. The only person left in line ahead of her was an older woman in a house dress and an apron.

  “Come,” Harold said. “How could you deprive me of looking at my symbol of imperfection?”

  She laughed. “I couldn’t, of course.”

  She took his hand and he instantly knew they would be together for a long, long time. He had found his soul mate.

  Laughing and talking all the way, the man who had always desired perfection, but had learned he could never attain it, walked up the hot sidewalk with the naked woman, who had always thought she was perfect, but had suddenly understood she had a flaw.

  About the Author

  Bestselling author Dean Wesley Smith has written more than one hundred popular novels and hundreds of published short stories. His novels include the science fiction novel Laying the Music to Rest and the thriller The Hunted as D.W. Smith. With Kristine Kathryn Rusch, he is the coauthor of The Tenth Planet trilogy and The 10th Kingdom.

  He writes under many pen names and has also ghosted for a number of top bestselling writers.

  Dean has also written books and comics for all three major comic book companies, Marvel, DC, and Dark Horse, and has done scripts for Hollywood. One movie was actually made.

  Over his career he has also been an editor and publisher, first at Pulphouse Publishing, then for VB Tech Journal, then for Pocket Books. He is now an executive editor for Fiction River.

  Currently, he is writing thrillers and mystery novels under another name.

 

 

  Smith, Dean Wesley, Standing in Line at the Intersection

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