Popsicle Summer

Chapter 1

It's the dusty dry, summer heat of 2009. Back home in the States, a girl sits, sprawled on the cobbled gray steps of a small stucco cottage with a rustic garden, circular window in the attic and smokestack. She takes a lick of her popsicle, and quietly, in that way your mind often does when you're sitting and thinking idly, it slips quietly away and nobody knows it, transporting her to the sweet Popsicle Summer of 2006.