Rachel meets Heather

Swarming with Butterflys, her mind
tried to focus on sentences but scanned
the same one, fifteen, twenty times.
The smell of antiseptic and the thought
of getting pricked and prodded
wasn’t appealing. So she thought of
that kiss. In the parking lot. On a dark,
cloudy, murky night. And the thought
made her smile. Focusing on reading
was useless.

She felt eyes, then, from across the room.
She looked up and found a polite and gracious
face, a little older than her own, a smooth,
unblemished face with a few of time’s wrinkles
at the eyes. She was feminine and small, sitting,
waiting. She smiled in a friendly way. Rachel
smiled back and quickly retreated to the article
open in her lap, attempting to avoid a conversation.
Those eyes had been kind, caring, curious.
What had she been looking at?
Even now, after all this time, Rachel was not
accustomed to being noticed.

The woman wasn’t very far away. She asked a
polite question. Rachel gave her a curt and
abbreviated answer. She asked another.
She invited herself to Rachel’s side. And suddenly,
under the influence of her smell, her wondering and
compassionate gaze and careful questions, the
conversation became interesting to Rachel.
And even after she was called from the waiting
room to be inspected and sent away with a new
prescription, she thought about it. And thinking led
to curiosity.

And now she had two preoccupations:
Butterfly and a field of Heather.