After the Ball by Misha Crews

After the Ball

by Misha Crews

Sometimes I think that every time we take a breath we're cheating death. Please excuse the accidental rhyme, there, not to mention the macabre subject matter, but it's true. My mother died when I was seventeen, my father when I was nineteen. My only sibling, a sister, died in infancy. Given my family's tendency toward "short-lifedness," the fact that I am still here to talk to you today is something of a miracle.

I'm not really a morose person, but circumstances do sometimes make me ponder: we're born, we die, and in between…what?

Love, my mother would have said, with stars in her eyes. Sweetly sentimental, my mother was, but hardly realistic. I, as you might imagine, turned out to be just the opposite.

My name is Midge Geddes. In the summer of 1957 I was twenty-four years old. Practically an old maid by the standards of the day, but I was happy enough. I had a home in Washington, DC, which was a small city but an exciting one, and a job as a secretary in a real estate development firm, which was pleasant work. It was so pleasant, in fact, that I hadn't taken a vacation in the two years since I'd started there. And I had no real intention of vacationing, either. But one night in the spring of that year I was almost killed stepping off the curb in front of my apartment house. That sort of thing can affect a person. Ray Ferguson, my boss, had been urging me to take some time off, and after my little "incident" I decided to take him up on his suggestion.

I could have gone to New York to visit with some of my old college friends. I could have made like a pioneer woman and gone out west. But for some reason, I chose instead to go to the Eastern shore, to a little town called Bartlett. I guess I thought that the cool tranquility of the ocean would be a nice change from the sticky heat of the city.

It was a change, all right, but not the one I'd imagined.

For one, the weather in Bartlett turned out to be just as unpleasant as it had been in Washington. For two, the Summer Fair was in full swing when my bus pulled into town, meaning that the place was overrun with tourists, and every night the restaurants and bars closed down so that the owners and their families could take part in the festivities. So in the evenings the only thing to do was to venture down to the pier, and try to enjoy myself. Of course, being neither the parent of a child nor a child itself, my tastes did not tend to run to Ferris wheels and halls of mirrors. The Tunnel of Love might have been fun if there had been someone to share it with, but at the moment I was alone, and content to be so. I'm not really a complainer, normally, but I admit that the high temperatures and the boredom were making me cranky.

In the early evening of my third day in town, when the heat of my little room became oppressive, I escaped to the street. As the sun began its final descent of the day, my feet turned towards the fair. I was hoping to catch the stirring of an evening breeze and maybe treat myself to an ice cream.

More... Passionate Hearts: An Anthology of Love, Passion, and Romance

Misha Crews has lived in and around DC all her life. Raised in a family of book-lovers, her mother first encouraged her to read by offering to pay her two cents per page of her picture books. But Misha soon traded the pennies for the riches of the written word, and since then she has seldom been seen without a book in her hand.

Like most writers, she has been telling stories for as long as she can remember. The first ones, of course, were the stories she told her parents: I didn't eat the candy! Or maybe I finished my homework already! Later she graduated from making up fibs to making up plays, poems, songs and stories.

At the age of fourteen, while attending Chesapeake Academy, she took over production of her school newsletter, and was instantly hooked on the craft of writing. Since then she has written everything from short stories to plays to ad copy. Her first novel, Homesong, was completed in early 2008. She is married and is currently living and working in Northern Virginia.