Near Love Stories
by J. B. Hogan

One cold Sunday evening in January with a light wind blowing a light snow around, the boy headed down Dickson Street after work. He walked along slowly, his shoes making a squeaking sound in the accumulating snow. He saw himself in the windows of the newsstand where he read all the sports magazines and, surreptitiously, the girlie mags. He pulled the collar of his old coat tighter against his neck and with one hand tried to push up his slightly fallen flat top hair cut.

Walking on, he went past the railroad station, now out of use, and over the tracks he so often took in getting around town. He climbed up Dickson then, past the drug store with the candy and cigar machine out front where he and his buddies had bought the nausea-producing smokes they experimented with off and on. Further up there was the Piggly Wiggly store set well back off the street and then the old bowling alley and across from it the UArk theatre where he had seen Winchester 73 with Jimmy Stewart when he, the boy, was just a kid.

He turned right on Arkansas Avenue just below the elevated grounds of the university campus that he loved so much and where he went as often as he could to walk its sidewalks filled with the engraved names of all its graduates from all its years. The campus was always beautiful to him with its huge oak and maple trees, its well kept grounds, and its wonderful centerpiece, Old Main, the two-towered brick building that housed the boy's favorite place almost in the whole world - the museum, with its reconstructed Mastodon skeleton, its Civil War exhibits and its room full of intoxicating, multi-colored glass bottles and vases.

Near the center of the campus grounds off Arkansas Avenue were a set of steps leading up to Old Main and the boy headed for those. The wind had nearly died down for the moment and the snow fell softly though steadily. There was a street lamp near the steps and it shone down out of the dark night onto the sidewalk like a cool white spotlight. The boy paused at the curb on his side of the street to check for cars and then walked out to the tree-lined median that divided the street. He had to wait a moment on the median as a south-bound car drove slowly by, its tires crunching the snow beneath them.

When the car passed, its glaring lights no longer blocking the boy's vision, he stepped out into the street and slowly made his way to the opposite curb. As he reached the other sidewalk, the boy looked over at the stairs beneath the street lamp and there she was. There she was, standing on the sidewalk in front of the steps in the snow under the light. The boy had not seen where she came from. She was just suddenly there. A young, pretty coed framed in the halo-light of the street lamp. The boy stopped dead in his tracks.