Skylar Fisher was lying in front of her fireless place naked with her legs up in the air. Her “fireless place” was what she called the pre-fab wood burning fireplace that had never seen a fire in the twenty years she had been married to Jerry. The way her boyfriend was working on her made her smile; he flipped her over and started hitting her sideways, and she was just about to go around the bend when her husband walked in and sat down on the sofa.
“You know, the jet stream is acting up again, something like we haven’t seen in decades. Of course this is certainly going to have a most powerful effect on El Nino; and with all the mud slides in California it looks like it is time to batten down the hatches. Many of my colleagues nationwide want to jump onto the global warming bandwagon. Personally, I am not ready to agree with them”, he said as he inserted his right index finger into his left nostril.
Skylar was watching her meteorologist husband until boyfriend flipped her over and started hitting her from behind. She was inwardly rolling her eyes at her husband’s antics as she did her customary yelping, hollering, and scratching as they both finished, each of them collapsing on the floor. Jerry Fisher walked over to the little table by the television and picked up his bible, plopping down in the leather wing back chair, and turned to one of his favorite passages.
“Blessed are the blah, blah, blah, for they will blah, blah, blah”, Skylar heard him say as she lay in the floor catching her breath. Sometimes she thought her husband was surely the biggest goofball nerd in the world, but this scenario being acted out in her living room seemed just a bit too strange, as if it just couldn’t possibly be happening.
Skylar awoke from her dream in a cold sweat; she was alone in bed. She looked over to Jerry’s side of the bed and saw a note. Turning the lamp on the side table on she read “heading to Red Springs—big tornado action down there. Will call later, Jerry”.
“That has got to be the strangest dream ever”, she said out loud. Skylar looked at the clock on the night stand and saw that it was seven o’clock, her usual waking time, and got out of bed, pulling on her well-worn housecoat. The coffee would be ready when she got downstairs, and she was certainly ready for it. She was pretty useless until she had downed at least two cups, and she needed for her mind to be a little more clear before she delved into that strange dream.
She purposely thought of absolutely nothing until she got the second cup down, then she started thinking about the dream. As she reflected on the events that had fomented the cold sweat she began to think that it was not really that strange at all. Okay, there was a boyfriend in there, but she had one, and a very good and active one. And they were doing all of the positions that they usually employed, so nothing strange there. The biggest curiosity besetting her was Jerry walking in while they were going at it and doing his weather monologue and then reading from Beatitudes. Skylar loved doing dream interpretations and as she pondered her husband’s appearance it began making some sense.
“I guess his not paying attention to us while we were screwing is not too much of a shock; he is pretty oblivious to everything except the friggin’ weather”, she thought, remembering the multitudinous times she would get calls from him when he was at the tv station and he would drone on forever about the Doppler effect or a dust storm in Oklahoma or a late spring snowfall in northern Virginia. After all the years she was used to this and she had learned to totally tune him out, interjecting an “uh huh” or a “yep” occasionally. She remembered how one time she had laid the phone down for fifteen minutes and when returning said “oh, yeah”, and he had not even known she was gone. Having satisfied her inquiring mind about the weather monologue she moved on to his picking his nose. It didn’t take Skylar’s active mind long to figger this one out.
“Well, he is just about the biggest nerd around, even the school kids make fun of him”, she thought to herself, “and ,it wouldn’t take too much creativity to imagine him working on his nose in front of the camera. “
“He would probably be in one of those Ed Sullivan poses he assumes”, she mused, imagining Jerry Fisher with his long arms wrapped around his shoulders, all hunched over, and then flinging one of his appendages around and putting his finger square up his nose. Skylar was starting to have fun with this dream interpretation deal, and moved on to the Bible reading part; however, she quickly explained it away by remembering that Jerry had become increasingly more religious over the past few years, while she seemed to be able to find an excuse to lay out of church more and more occasionally.
That left only one interpretation standing—the boyfriend. Skylar, basking in the glory of her Freudian talents, laughed out loud at how easy this one was. She indeed had a boyfriend, whom she took care of at every opportunity. “Nothing too complicated about that “, she chuckled as she headed upstairs to shower. Skylar was a very meticulous person, and she would have stayed down stairs all morning to figure her dream out if she had had to.
Skylar showered, put on makeup and dressed. She had been retired for several years and collected a small social security check, Jerry being the big bread winner in the family. She got into her car and headed to town to go shopping, an activity she loved and did at every opportunity. But even shopping bored her eventually, and she had taken up doing a little volunteer work at the local hospital; however, she got away from the hospital gig after only a few months. Skylar had always known that she was not a patient person, and being around sick people really brought it out in her. She recalled how one day she had yelled “Well sit down in the damn thing” at an old lady she was trying to help into a wheel chair. She had stalked out of the room abruptly and left the old lady wondering what she had done to bring about that treatment. Skylar had grabbed her purse and left the hospital, sitting in her car for fifteen minutes, feeling a little sad for the old lady, but realizing that she was the last person who should be taking care of the elderly. Skylar laughed sitting in the car as she remembered a scene from an old movie where a woman pushes her sister down a long set of steps in a wheelchair. “Guess I’m a bit impatient to have patience with patients”, she had said, laughing as she had driven away from the hospital.
But she still shopped quite a bit; sometimes she would buy three or four tops and wind up taking all of them back the next day. Skylar did not consider herself vain, thinking that all she really wanted to do was look as good as she could. She was a looker; most men would consider her twenty years younger than her 58 years. “Lotions and potion”, she would respond when asked how she kept such a youthful appearance. After Skylar left the house and ran through a few of her favorite stores she remembered that she needed to go to the mall. She was reminded when she looked at her watch and noticed it said twelve o’clock, when she knew it was going on four in the afternoon. “My timeless Timex”, she chuckled to herself, remembering that the battery in her watch had died. She drove into the mall parking lot and went in and walked down to the little kiosk which sold and installed watch batteries for $10.00 a pop. She handed her watch over to the attendant and just stood around; it usually took about five minutes to change the battery, not enough time to go shopping, so she just people watched—more specifically men watched. Although Skylar had a boyfriend she did not feel “bound” to him; however, she would never tell him anything but that she was totally faithful. She really had a bond with Rob, the bf, although when she reflected on it she always concluded the bond was way more sexual than any kind of “love” thing. Rob was a very dark and muscular long distance truck driver she had consorted with for four years; their normal rendezvous was in his single wide trailer out in the woods in the country. “Except when we are doing our dream screwing”, she laughed as she thought about her big stud. Hubby Jerry’s penchant for chasing tornadoes and unparalleled mania for any type of aberrational weather caused him to be absent fairly frequently, and of course Rob could be gone for two weeks at a time and then home for as much as five days. These schedules provided some “gaps” that begged to be filled.
Skylar thought about some of her gap filling episodes as she waited on her watch and watched men go by. She knew she could have about any one she wanted, so she had to be a little careful, just giving little hints of smiles, not being overly forward. “If I really cut loose I’d have them running out the door after me”, she thought as she handed the clerk ten bucks and collected her watch.
When Skylar found herself a bit lonely due to Jerry and Rob’s schedules her favorite entertainment was dressing up and going to a bar in a neighboring town, one far enough away to where she felt she would not run into anybody she knew. Skylar did not do it very often, but when she committed to the trip she never came up empty handed, and always wound up with a very good looking man she had never seen before in her life. And invariably the man was at least twenty five years her junior. One man at a time, and never any other kind of arrangement. Skylar had some pretty strict rules about these encounters; number one, she always packed a condom, number two, she always went with only one guy, never two. Skylar was so very strict about this behavior for a very good reason; she frequently experienced fantasies about being with two men at the same time in the same bed. The fantasies were extremely exciting, but were even more frightening to her. She had long ago decided that the fantasy had to remain just that; “no two on one fast breaks for me”, she had concluded, using a basketball term she had learned from a sportswriter she consorted with once.
Skylar left the mall and made a decision; Jerry was going to be gone overnight at some seminar on La Nina and Rob was heading out to Arizona, so the logical behavior for a beautiful, horny woman of fifty eight who looked thirty eight was to get laid. Skylar laughed out loud as she thought of this and drove home, already planning what she was going to wear.
Skylar had just gotten out of the shower, dried off, and had a towel wrapped around her head. She stood in front of the full length mirror in the bathroom she shared with her nerdy meteorologist hubby and looked at herself. When she had turned fifty five she had gotten a hankering to get tattooed and had gotten three, all of them on her back side. One was a likeness of Bugs Bunny chewing on a carrot; this one adorned the area just to the right of the small of her back. The second one was of a little yellow Tweetie Pie; Tweetie resided on the back of her neck. The third was a likeness of the Tasmanian Devil, complete with little fleeting circles depicting the twirling of the cartoon character. Tas had been placed high up on her right ass cheek. Skylar laughed as she looked at her tattoos, holding a mirror in front so she could see her back. She thought they were awfully cute and never regretted having it done. Skylar had pretty much been a latch key child, what with both her parents working in the textile mill in the little Piedmont town she grew up in, so she would busy herself with her homework when she got home, knowing she could watch what she wanted on television once she was done. She was very bright, “one of the smart girls” the dumber boys in the class always said, a trace of envy always in their voices. So once she did her schoolwork she would turn on the tv and try to find cartoons; more times than not she would find the Warner Brothers characters on one of the three channels they received with the rabbit ears, complete with a strip of aluminum foil connecting the two ears. As she looked at herself she thought about how much she had loved the cartoons; she still watched them occasionally. She placed the mirror on the counter and looked closely at her body. She had 34 Double D breasts and they had not one bit of a sign of sagging; she cupped the twins as she looked at her image and had to make herself stop and dry her hair. Skylar knew full well that if she kept those shenanigans up she would find herself spread-eagled with her “buddy” and her schedule was too tight to give up that time. “Batteries are dead anyway”, she chuckled, realizing that the drive to Hunterton was a good forty-five minutes and it was already seven thirty. Skylar always liked to get “on the scene” before too late, knowing that if the night waned on things got a little too drunk for her taste. Besides, she loved to get several around her and chat with all of them, then “pick one out of the pack” and go about her business.
Skylar quickly applied makeup; she was a pro at it and could make herself gorgeous in just a few minutes. She had nice full tumescent lips and tended toward the darker shades of lipstick. She picked out a below the knee black dress with a slit going up to about eight inches above her knee. She liked this one a lot; it had a super plunging neck line to show off the “Skylar Beauties”, as she called them. She completed her wardrobe with her $300 dollar Coach purse Jerry had bought her for Christmas. He was always very generous with her; however, she would only do something nominal for him, like a cheap tie. She figgered it just made him want her more; plus she usually let him be a little “lucky” around Christmas and birthday time. Skylar concluded that hubby was getting the better end of the deal. “Best end he ever had”, she said and laughed as she picked up her Coach and headed out the door.
Apparently Jerry had a lot of company in having a reverential feeling about Skylar’s “end”. Before she had married the tornado chaser she had been with a grand total of eight men, and every one of them professed their love to her once they got in her pants. And Skylar was not just any kind of pick me up in those days in her early twenties; she made them work for it, sometimes as long as two months before she would let them have any. That’s when it would start, the incessant protestations of love and flowers and rings and jewelry. She could stand it for a while, but invariably she would grow weary and start feeling smothered. The outcome was quite predictable; Skylar would grow distant with them and finally point blank tell them that she just didn’t think things were going to “work out”. Then to a man they would call several times a day, calls that Skylar would ignore. This would go on for about two weeks and then they would drop back to once every week, then once every two weeks, and wind up being just once in a blue moon, usually late at night. She figgered that these were drunken “booty calls” and they too were ignored. Skylar was not foolish enough to believe everything some horny guy told her, but she did know how wild she was in the sack and how she could go for hours, always outlasting her partner. Taking all of this into account Skylar had decided that those eight were not lying when they all told her that it was “the best they ever had”. Skylar reflected on these things as she made the forty five minute drive to The Beacon Bar and Grill, a place one of her girlfriends had told her about. “Lots of good looking young guys in there”, her friend Margie had told her. “You will drive them crazy”, Margie had said . Skylar looked at herself in the rear view mirror and pursed her sexy lips. “Guess we are gonna find out”, she said out loud and smiled at herself.
Skylar was lying on her back doing her duty. It was Jerry’s birthday, so she threw in a few moans and yelps to make it authentic. Skylar kept it up for two or three minutes, which is about how long Jerry did. Then he jumped out of bed and dressed quickly to go cut the grass because he KNEW it was going to rain in two hours. She was tempted to call out “Honey, did you go off halfcocked” as the meteorologist hurried out but she managed to hold her tongue. The weatherman was very sensitive about any performance issues since last year on the same day he had caught Skylar texting while they were doing it. She giggled as she remembered how upset he had gotten and how he had sulked for two days.
It had been a week since her encounter at The Beacon in Huntington and she reflected on what had happened that night. Things had started out okay, going pretty much the way she expected. She had arrived about eight thirty and immediately caused a stir at the bar, what with the way she looked and was attired. It wasn’t long before three of the “young good looking men” Margie had promised were hovering over her, so then it was just a matter of sorting through them. The quartet chatted genially for a good thirty minutes, all of them sipping on a drink, until the culling process was done and she took the hand of George, a plumbing contractor, and guided him over to a secluded booth. The other two men recognized that they had been rejected and went quietly into that good night. Within twenty minutes Skylar knew that George was single, had a nearby apartment, and would fill the bill. She was aware of the last item because in her under the table investigation she had given his crotch a gentle squeeze and had decided that “it was within the realm of acceptance”. They had gone to his apartment, had a couple more drinks and hopped in the sack.
An hour later Skylar had been home reflecting on what a bummer night it had been. First of all George was small, something she had been surprised by since she had done her “due diligence”. Then it got worse; ol’ George lasted about five minutes plumbing the depths and that was it. Skylar tried to mask her disappointment as she quickly dressed and threw a goodbye over her shoulder as she went out the door. Skylar suspected that George had inserted something in his pants that night; that was the only thing that could explain the “wad” she had felt when she had grabbed him at the bar. Skylar was satisfied that was probably what had happened; she was always suspicious since she had been fooled by a guy in a bar in Charlotte who it turned out had duct taped a banana to his inner thigh. “Hope it was good in his corn flakes the next morning”, Skylar mused, laughing out loud as she dressed.
Skylar headed to the mall to do some shopping; she found herself shopping more and more and buying all kinds of stuff only to take it back the next day. She was becoming so bored, so very bored, with her married life, her boyfriend, and her escapades in out of town bars. Understanding her feelings was not a problem, it was what in the hell to do about it. As she was driving she started taking stock of where she stood in her life. For one thing, the finances were fine; the weatherman was a very trusting soul, and a very conservative one fiscally. Instead of fooling with “that durned risky stock market” Jerry had three hundred thousand dollars in a joint savings account. “It might be earning only 2 % but I know where the hell it is,” he always told her when she asked if he didn’t want to be a little more adventurous investment wise. “Of course the savings account is very, very, accessible to both of us”, she thought, a little smile starting to play at the corners of her pretty mouth. Skylar had been harboring a fantasy for the last couple of months, and she had no idea how in the world she had come up with it.
The fanstasy was getting her beautiful dyed hair cut, letting it go gray, and moving to some small fishing village on the New England coast, where she would get a job in a little restaurant and meet a fisherman and live in a little cottage. The more she thought about it the more she became enthralled with it, and the more she became enthralled with it the more she became terrified that she would do it. Skylar always, always had to figger things out, especially when they seemed inexplicable. Her best effort in understanding her idea was that she was just tired of the façade bullshit, like dyeing her hair, like pretending to love the mad meteorologist, like pretending to love her boyfriend, and pretending to get off on her bar encounters. “It’s all so damn fake,” she said out loud as she pulled into the mall parking lot. Skylar sat in her 530 red BMW for a good twenty minutes, then drove home. Jerry had already gone to work on the afternoon shift so she was alone as she packed one large suitcase. She tossed it in the car and drove to the savings and loan and had the teller make out a certified check for two hundred eighty thousand dollars, not wanting to leave her nerd totally penniless. Then she drove to Super Cuts and paid twelve dollars to have her hair chopped off just below the ears. The gray would take a while to return, but Skylar figgered she would have plenty of time for that. When she came out of Super Cuts she lowered the top on the red convertible and drove the twenty minutes to I-95, entering the northbound ramp, smiling into the wind as she thought of what a wonderful life she would have with her fisherman.