First Down and Far to Go

The weather had turned warm and I wanted to get out in the night air and smell the trees. She came out shortly after.

“Looks like rain,” she said.
“Yeah,” I replied and looked up in a cursory scan of the low and fast-moving clouds as they breezed over us in apparent apathy for what we really wanted tonight. The sky was swollen; fat with the wet promise of future downpours and already leaning in; brooding and threatening us with the imminent delivery of her watery progeny on a Wednesday night.
She slung a pack over her shoulder and tugged on my hand.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s walk down to the high school and jump the fence and spend some quality time on the fifty yard line. Best seats in the house.”
I looked back up uneasily at the foreboding sky and cut my eyes at her slightly. “Just because we can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not up there,” I told her.
“What?” she asked.
“A Full Moon.”
“What are you worried about?” She asked. I just looked at her knowingly. “Werewolves?” she asked me, frowning.
“Yeah,” I said. “Werewolves.”
She slung the pack around and unzipped a pocket to remove an evil-looking little package of Instant Death. I could see it in the half-light of the evening and the steel-blue sheen flashed in her hand as she slid the clip out and turned it toward me. I could see the polished gleam of shiny silver in the hazy glaze of the streetlights.
“Silver bullets,” she said, smiling.
“Let’s rock,” I said.

We walked down through the misty crisp twist of another night in our little corner of the world.
She handed me the pack and slithered over the fence. She dropped about five feet and landed with an easy grace that made her appear boneless as she soaked up all the recoil in a fluid-smooth bouncing roll. I tossed the pack over and she caught it easily…one-handed.
I scrambled up and over and managed to gash my leg open as I let go for my own version of a soft landing. The red showed up even in the dark and the sweet, coppery aroma of fresh blood spread onto the sleepy breeze and I knew that if there were any errant werewolves lurking about they would be sure to pick up the scent of a potential kill. I knew how they operated and those bastards were smarter than most normal people realized, or even suspected for that matter.
She unzipped another pocket and applied various antiseptic potions and salves to my wound and spoke slow, moaning words of quiet healing as she wrapped the whole affair in gauze that shone with the pure white of Flaming Justice. I felt better and safe.
“You got everything in there don’t you?” I asked.
She just grinned in her flippant way and re-slung the pack over her shoulder and we trooped out to the fifty yard line.
She sat down and reached up for my hand and I collapsed next to her on the damp grass.
It brought back too many memories of my truant youth and all the autumn nights I had spent trudging through the wet grass, hand in hand with one young girl or another as we looked for a good spot. And we usually found it out in the country on the edge of the Deep Woods where we spread an itchy blanket and prepared to Get Down while some farmer’s cows out on the loose in the dark were lowing to each other as they searched for nothing more than what we had already found.
She leaned back to lie out flat on the grass of the field and I did too. I could feel the hash marks beneath my hands and I swear that I could sense the green of the grass through my clothes as it leeched up from the world to permeate my life and remind me of what really mattered tonight.
I heard another zipper and she handed me a bottle and smiled. I opened it right up, right there, right on. We passed it back and forth and made great strides and Herculean efforts to finish it off as fast we could.
We slugged it back like a white-hot bottle of liquid whiplash and drifted off in the sudden comfort of a warm November night.
And, through the clouds, I could feel a weird tugging in my middle and I knew that the Full Moon was up there working on me; rising my internal tide and pulling me up toward the sky; throbbing, pulsing, but only to release me time and again to settle back into the groove I had already cut in this world.
I closed my eyes and lost it all on the fifty yard line with the roar of an imaginary crowd ringing in my ears.