The Beast on the Far Edge of Summer
By John Luthens
The start of school lurked on the far edge of summer like a hungry beast. It had been nothing but a gentle puppy in June, but now, there it was: wildly grown in only three short months, yellow eyes glowing like a school bus with a fresh haircut on its shaggy mane and a backpack full of books between its meaty paws. It was chewing down pencils an inch at a crack and slobbering a frothy substance from its mouth that looked like melted glue sticks.
The beast awaits on the far edge of summer.
I always ran breathless in the opposite direction to avoid being dragged into its cavern of higher learning. But the beast on the far edge of summer was a bittersweet foe. It never failed to chase me like a bully into the overgrown weeds of my fading summer playground.
Cracking over fallen logs and sliding into dried-up stream beds, craning over my shoulder and peering into the sunset of endless summer. The destination wasn’t important. What was important was the fact that my escape from the beast was reached on foot, and not on the spit-ball infested seats of a bus that would soon enough be hauling me away to the educational penitentiary.
Every leaf seemed greener and every flower brighter. The fading, white crowns of queen Anne’s lace and the waving grandeur of golden rod. The glowing purple of autumn lupine blooming regal along the country roadsides where I walked my final rites. It was a certainty that some Biology teacher would try and teach me the functioning parts of the plants and flowers in short order, but the roll call of my true outdoor world was one that I would soon be absent for.
Savoring my last peanut butter sandwich of the summer and plucking wild grapes from the tangles, munching quietly, hiding from the beast in the soft carpet of needles beneath a stand of pines and watching as the carefree red squirrels gathered cones for their winter stockpile. It tasted like a final bite of heaven, even though the self-same sandwich and grapes which would soon be plucked out of a lunch box and placed on a sanitized cafeteria table would end up tasting worse than the pinecones the squirrels were packing away.
No golden lake of summer was safe when the beast came calling.
Try as I might, I never found a deep-enough lake for fishing, a long-enough trail for hiking, or a high-enough tree for climbing. The winds of autumn betrayed me, and the beast always sniffed me out in my hiding place and dragged me kicking and screaming across the far edge of summer and into the hallways of September.
It went on like that, year after year, until the time finally came when the beast got tired of waiting for me. I can’t recall the exact moment – it was a long time ago – but the beast backed slowly away from the far edge of summer. I moved on, and I’m willing to bet that my teachers were as tired as the beast.
Walking home the other day from the office, I saw my first school bus of the season. It was still early, but the sun was already sinking low on the horizon and the shadows were growing longer. Fields of goldenrod waved in the distance like fallen rainbows.
The far edge of summer.
It may have been my imagination, but I thought I heard the snapping of branches, the falling of leaves and the trampling of grass. And I swore I heard a lonely howl somewhere deep off the path and long behind me. After all these years, the beast is still hungry, and the far edge of summer is still a melancholy place.
John Luthens is a freelance writer and photographer from Grafton, Wisconsin. His first novel, Taconite Creek, is available on Amazon or at www.cablepublishing.com or by contacting the author at Luthens@hotmail.com