"Wiaparettalittle"

This is just a bit of sudden fiction. And I realized as I was writing it, how poor my typing skills have become. I'm leaving off the last letters of words, misspellings and inverting entire phrases. I really need to practice more. Story begins after the asterisks.

***

The town cloaked itself in downed leaves at night, like the last lonely traveler on a road in a deserted land, all the others driven out by night terrors and the stale holiday treats of remorseful family gatherings. It was a town where June came when June said, she being the defiant youngest daughter of the oldest living mayor in the state, a forgotten man whose policies were so backwards they came back around to front and fell most in line with the smallish yet increasingly progressive community. They were isolated, but they were kind. Forgotten, but comforted. And no one ever wanted for the love of another ...

... but for June picking grapes among the frogs in the ankle-deep water of her Uncle's farm. In the hottest day of the year she would not have the gust of breath from mechanical engineering in her modest, glassless-windowed house. She preferred the hot black asphalt beneath her bare feet as she stepped in and out of the leaves - the crisp oranges and reds cracking beneath her soles with each misstep.

A wild-haired dog once, but ran away, laid in her yard and barked with each creak of her rocking chair on the broken porch. She'd eat the grapes by peeling, then eating the modest flesh between her teeth, before chomping the insides down easily. They were decimated.

Her best friend in the world, who walked -- no, ran -- to the big city when the first big opening came sent her an invitation to her 5th wedding anniversary a couple weeks ago. June opened it in front of the postman.

"Card there, June?" The man asked. His skin was pink, or was it the white cobwebs that seemed to stick to it's surface, and he smiled with one black hole in a dozen yellow teeth. Tipped his hat up and wiped his brown with a white handkerchief.

"Mmm," she tipped that light strawberry tongue out across her upper lip. "I believe it's an invitation, Mr. Postman."

"An invitation to what?"

The card on lily white paper unfolded accordion style between her hands, one low one high. Throughways he could see her, but a shadow. Just other than night, among the water thick with the humid croaks of backwards frogs, he was most all that saw her most days, even this way.

"To a matter not here, but there. In the big city, down the road and further."

"You think you'll be attending?"

"Don't know how I'd get there."

"Well," he scratched the direct center of his forehead with one yellowed and dully pointed fingernail, "I could take you this Friday in my postal access vehicle, if you'd don't mind sitting on the wrong side of the road. With no door."

June lowered her hand and the paper folded over incorrectly, bowing out and arching wrongways between her hands. She looked to the bare patch of yard where the dog had laid, then back into the house taking a mental survey of her belongings and her things for putting belongings into, estimating how much room she'd need and whether she'd have time to set into Trimby's General Store before that afternoon of departure.

"I think that would suit me well," she said, turning back to the postman and granting a broad June smile. Same thing that'd light up a room of a lucky gentleman on a prom night in high school, getting the go ahead for a kiss, but not all the way. Cause modesty serves most, but serves her best and on that Friday, she went with the postman out of that town past the leaves, leaving Wiaparettalittle.