gold dust girl

I'm working on something. This is part of it and also, my happy place...

She jangled her foggy glass and tipped it back and forth in front of one opened eye, letting the clear rocks form a kaleidoscope with the tangerine sunset.  The ice had diluted the caramel liquid into the color of cola at the end of a thriller, touched only by its nervous owner's tight grip and foregone by his mouth.  Upon getting a satisfactory level of entertainment from her cocktail-horizon tango, she put down her arm on the stiff plastic and leaned back, closing her eyes.  The cheap rubber of her neon pink and white lawn chair squeaked the way new ones tend to and suddenly, she remembered she'd have stripes all over the exposed part of her summer skin.  

Those stripes, much like pillow cheek marks, were once something to be giggled at and giddily anticipated in the days of Kool Aid and cardboard boxes and fresh green lawns awaiting imaginations to turn them into faraway lands. Now, she sighed lazily.  That same imagination now tackled more practical topics, like what her thighs and back would look like with tiny maroon crevices in the neat pattern of a Walgreens chair.  Her sigh reminded her the smell she knew so well, having visited her grandparents' vacation home since childhood.  Not so much even the olfactory notes but the feeling of the dry, warm air in her nostrils.  There was comfort in the hot air that blanketed her and the sun browning her skin from milk to honey.  Tomorrow it would feel tender, especially in the parts that sunk into the crevices of the pink and white.  But the cold bourbon that  had just doubled as visual stimulation romanced her wits and convinced her this blissful moment would leave both her and her shell invincible...