Bitter Orange

The memory of my first sight of Cara stirs me. She was wearing a long crocheted dress, and I was certain even from my distance, no brassiere. The sun had nearly set on the other side of the house and her body was in shadow, but her head, where she tilted it back to look up, was vivid. I knew her already- hot-blooded and prickly, bewitching; a flowering cactus. I must have also been excited by an anticipation of my own reinvention, of possibility, of summer.