Red Cadillac

Olga Veronsky left her red Cadillac parked in the lot outside the Sawmill Inn.  She stuffed into her backpack the remaining contents from her three-foot Igloo cooler:  a half-eaten cantaloupe, two oatmeal raisin cookies, a quarter of a jar of almond butter, and a chilled bottle of Smart Water.  She was headed down the road to Marshall Gulch on Mt. Lemmon in the early evening of a post-monsoon July storm day in Arizona.

As the former--almost forty-five years ago--ballerina in the corps de ballet, her steps were still crisp, her long neck and back held upright.  She didn't look eighty-years old and she didn't feel it. Always one to have wanderlust, she had driven from Dallas with the intent to explore all the mountain ranges of the west, and the Catalinas were included on that long list.

Malcom Studderbridge, her lover and partner for twenty years, was inside the copper can she carried in her backpack.  He went with her everywhere in death as he had in life.

"Malcom, darling.  Do you smell this air?  It's so sweet and yet, there's a tinge of dust.  It's tickling my nose."

Olga wiped her nose with a neatly-pressed pink handkerchief and stuck it into her left denim shirt pocket; it waved like a small flag in the breeze.

"I think today, you'll be sprinkled under one of those old-growth pine trees.  The soil's very damp and you'll blend in with it just fine."

Olga swung her arms in rhythm to the recalled music of Swan Lake, quickly turning her full body along the side of the road.  Cars passed and a black and white dog barked at her dancing.  A black starling flew out of a small aspen tree and up into the clearing dark blue sky where clouds of white, dappled with sunset orange, topped the trees.