Jason Mortensen
Short Fiction
Boys of Summer was named to the shortlist in the 2025 Clarissa Dalloway Prize for Short Prose, judged by Diane Josefowicz
Recumbent in the comfort of an easy breeze off the water, Lyle Caldecott squints through his sunglasses at the streaky clouds in the blue sky, all rendered with a grayish hue through the lenses. “In the soup” his boss, Mick, had said about a paycheck after Lyle had submitted an invoice some days prior, an expression Lyle hadn’t heard before and had to puzzle over for a moment—the money would come, the invoice just had to be processed, or something to that effect.
Payment for services rendered notwithstanding, Lyle is as lazy as he can get away with, and especially now, feeling he can relish it, his back against his turquoise seashell towel, an ancient gift from Grandma Swanson surprisingly still in tact (both the towel and the grandmother), sand warm and lumpy and brown, Lyle shifting this way and that, to dig his backside into just the right spot, eyes shut against the sun, even under the dented pair of sunglasses purchased fifteen years ago that he almost never wears but bought because he wanted to, on occasion at least, look like a rock star. But it turned out he felt sheepish and silly when attempting the look and so rarely put them on. Now they perch awkwardly on his nose as he listens to the lapping of Lake Michigan somewhere not too far beyond his toes, calm on this August Thursday, and drifts with it and the errant voices, scraps of conversation too far off to really understand. There is nowhere else to be, at least for now, and not for a while—only lassitude’s indifferent ebbs and flows.
He has a book by his side that he’s been reading on and off, or pretending to read, or grazing momentarily until some daydream is spawned by the prose and he thinks back to his childhood or his vanishing young manhood. The book is Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman, and his index finger is tucked between pages 146 and 147, next to his thigh. The edition has a longish introductory essay Lyle hasn’t read yet though even beyond that the book seems long for a play. Lyle has found it amusing thus far, laughing out loud at the concocted love triangle, the good wimp, the brash quasi-revolutionary, and the sweetly conniving love interest, all under the sway of the silly patriarch. Shaw makes things seem important and unimportant at the same time, which feels very Irish, and Lyle can’t help but think of The Quiet Man and Roddy Doyle and of course James Joyce. All very sentimental, especially when pretending not to be.
Far more interesting is what’s out ahead of Lyle, in the water, a mythical, vanishing type: a fetching young blonde standing in the shallows, light liquid motion lapping her calves, she holding a book, a heavy-looking hardcover textbook, open in her left palm, her right-hand fingers curled over the page she will soon turn, her eyes covered by black Ray Bans. She wears a tasteful two-piece, white on the bottom, red on the top, and as if all this weren’t impressive and rare enough, she raises her right leg and rests her right foot over her left knee, a yoga pose of sorts for the college student, or so Lyle assumes she is. He’s seen Loyola gals out sunbathing—this being Rogers Park, Loyola being the university from which two of his good friends graduated right there on the coast—and he’s seen them lounging on towels reading or pretending to study, but he’s never seen one reading while standing in the water, on one leg no less. Her thighs combine power, grace, and balance, yet they are just there to support her focus, and Lyle has been watching her out of the side of his eyes, lying on his back, entering his own state of yoga calm, a term he learned from Madeline, a woman he started dating two weeks ago who teaches elementary school and believes in using yoga to relax children. But here on the beach is a goddess, a fully formed Athena in counterpoise over the circulating water. Lyle can’t help but wonder what he might possibly say or do to win her favor—saunter over with a “Hey, what’cha readin’ there?”—but he is not the brash type, usually anyway, or at least is fully reformed, scared straight as it were, and has after all started dating the aforesaid Madeline, so he will likely continue pretending to read as soon as his fascination recedes. Lyle finds the world’s judgments so cruel. Talk to her and you’re a sleazebag on multiple levels. Don’t talk to her and you feel like a coward, letting beauty fade with life itself. Would these be her judgments? Hard to say but they might be his.
Lyle lies in his favorite spot, two blocks from his apartment, a strip of sand north of the jetty where Pratt Avenue ends in a cul-de-sac and then beach begins. A good-size patch of waist-high beach grass stretches behind Lyle’s head, to the west, and the big lake spreads to the east. He likes to feel hidden and isolated here, wedged into a secret, sometimes very uncomfortably as it once turned out. One year prior, at this very spot lay Lyle, sans sunglasses, forearm over his eyes on a one-hundred-degree day courtesy most likely of global warming—plus probably also regular weather and climate patterns as governed by Kroll-Milanceicz Cycles—movements of planets and stars—shit that may as well be astrology even when it’s science, as Lyle has often opined, mostly to himself—when he sensed a presence. He doesn’t remember if he heard footsteps on the sand exactly though he may have, but, whatever the case, he cocked his arm and tilted his head in some mammalian reflex to get a view of whatever he heard or sensed and there she was—Trixie, Trixie the Pixie as he sometimes thought of her—for she was beautiful and petite, light on her feet, like Tinkerbell—that scene in Disney’s Peter Pan where she’s checking herself out in the mirror—Am I beautiful? she seems to wonder, as if the animators, probably all dudes in those days, would have had it any other way. But Trixie was real, all too real for Lyle, who had plunged head over heels for her when she’d given him the most intense “come hither” eyes anyone had given him in quite some time, like eons—or at least since the last full-on glaciation—the sort of heart-melting look that made him think, unironically, of Thomas Dolby—“deep as any ocean, sweet as any harmony”—just outside of the Sovereign, a nicely divey bar on Devon and Broadway where he’d happened to be on his own, watching baseball, and so they had started an affair, for she was married, though unenthusiastically, and it had driven Lyle mad, after she told him of her attachment, knowing that she always went home to him when they were done, that he rarely got to hold her afterward and sometimes cried after she left, though he never admitted it to anyone, not even his best pals, for he wanted to appear in all ways the independent, happy, self-sufficient fella he figured he was.
And so anyway, on that particular day when she had coincidentally been at the beach, one year prior, and he had looked up but in a stealthy sidewise fashion, he’d also seen out in the water her husband, whom he’d seen in photographs on her pink iPhone, when she would narrate things about him in a shit-talky way, and Lyle would feel sort of bad for him but also weirdly excited, and so Lyle saw him for the first time there in the flesh, water up to his knees, and only his knees because he was at least six-foot-four (to Lyle’s five-foot-nine, which he insisted was five-foot-nine-and-a-half until he was twenty-three and thought fuck it and has felt fine about it ever since) and the water’s fairly shallow until you get yards and yards out beyond the Nanny State, as Lyle sometimes called it, lifeguard rowboats, though to be fair sometimes people do get caught in strong currents, when the winds are much stronger and the lake becomes wild and choppy and all kinds of crazy currents and counter-currents wrestle strangely with the jetties and piers, creating wild waves at lunatic angles and you can kind of make out the broad directions of the currents, but also kind of not because of the tension and the choppiness, if you stand out at the end of, or if you dare stand out at the end of the concrete pier where the old lighting tower sits up in its rusty cage, wind whipping against your skin and hair, water splashing all around, foaming and menacing and also crazy spectacular, as if in slow motion, and the way time seems to move differently the farther out you look, as if far out on the water is even slower slow motion, another dimension, which in a way it is, and in fact Lyle lost a high school friend, a quiet, smart, artsy seventeen-year-old who drowned in Lake Michigan, though that had happened late at night and he had been there alone, and he may have been drinking, or so the rumors went, but at any rate there were no lifeguards in rowboats at that dark time already more than a decade and a half back, though it occasionally chances across Lyle’s thoughts on the wavy days when he stares out at the water, even though this kid—Morris had been his name and he wore paisley button-down shirts and comically oversized headphones all the time—and Lyle had never been super close and maybe Lyle thinks, because how could you not, of the Zutons song, the one made posthumously famous by Winehouse and Ronson, “sometimes I go out by myself and I look across the water,” and he inevitably makes a picture in his mind of every girl he’s ever loved or even just had an unrealistic crush on because at times the mind pivots from untimely death to love and its degrees of requitedness, and Lyle had, unfortunately as it turned out, loved this Trixie, whom he’d seen at his favorite spot a year prior, at which time she stepped lightly past him in the sand—she had always been so light on her feet, which was part of what made her sexy—not acknowledging him, she, in a purple one-piece, always so stunning to behold, and for a moment exactly between Lyle, on his back, forearm over eyes, and her husband, dude by the name of Chuck, bronze and muscular, a damned Adonis who could break Lyle over his knee but probably never would because he seemed chill and mature and—as important—he never really knew about Trixie and Lyle, never knew how she moaned, how she talked dirty and encouraged Lyle to do the same, which he felt weird about but gave it a go, getting whipped up in a frenzy of passion when she stuck her ample butt out for him to smack, and he would say “you like that, slut?” and she would moan and say “do it again,” and eventually “fuck me, fuck me” in staccato then legato then rubato commandments and he would feel himself absorbed in a dizzying whorl, her thighs so strong and smooth, her calves and toes wonderfully shaped, supporting her as he watched her shoulder blades, her lower back, the tension coursing through her until convulsions and then slack, collapse, heavy breathing, or the sudden awareness of breath after release.
In fact they had just had such a liaison two nights before that super-hot day, a doozy, probably because it was the first time she hosted. See, Chuck worked a graveyard security shift and she would at first slip away to Lyle’s place just after Chuck left but then had wanted Lyle to come to her, to their place in Uptown, a cozy condo two blocks east of the Green Mill, to sully her bed, or their bed, with their illicit passion, and so he finally agreed even though it terrified him, the prospect of being discovered, of Chuck coming home early, some sort of “I forgot something” moment, and how would he react? Instant double murder, no questions asked, followed by suicide? Screaming and chest-thumping followed by a fist fight that wouldn’t be close? Slumped shoulders and resignation?—which would almost be worse. What did she want out of all this anyway? What had Chuck ever done? Was she just bored? Was it revenge? Lyle never really knew and she never really did more than talk some shit about him now and then, but even that was at least forty-six to fifty-two percent affectionate, per Lyle’s calculations, and Lyle realized he wouldn’t have believed anything she said anyway, that she was untrustworthy on this score, yet he wanted to believe that she loved him, that there was just some overpowering connection, and it wasn’t really Chuck’s fault at all, just bad luck. And there was a connection in a way, but not really. Lyle knew he was, in the end, the “other man,” the side pony, the variety on the menu, the dish she’d never ordered but wanted to taste, and besides, it would have been impossible under the circumstances to turn it into anything serious, yet he often felt he wanted to, he wasn’t dating anyone else then, and despite or because of all this, seeing her traipse by in her little purple one-piece, her sweet ass wriggling as she passed, poor old oblivious Chuck wading out in the cool blue yonder, Lyle felt a little spasm in his body, a tug, as if she had him on a string no one else could see, not even him, and it was both exhilarating and humiliating at the exact same time, her boldness, her greed, her unmitigated sexual power, which she had unleashed on him so recently and so often, and now once in the bed she shared with dear ol’ cucked-Chuck, while he was working late at night, downtown hotel security, probably boring, Lyle imagined, with occasional moments of stress or maybe even danger—a theft, an armed intruder, a coked-up tourist with a machete. But Chuck seemed likeable. Wading in the water he seemed tall in that magnanimous way some men have, like the type of guy you could count on. How could he deserve this? But maybe he had gals on the side, maybe he was humorless or secretly cold and cruel. You’d think Trixie would’ve mentioned as much if it were true. But who isn’t a little cruel? Who is so perfect as to never ever be cruel, even on accident, even in passing? Who? But then Lyle wondered, did he deserve what then happened, after they passed him, after she bent over, ass up, thighs taut, to dip her hands in the water, after they closed the gap between themselves at the spot where the jetty is more like a pier and he sat on the concrete and she sat on his lap and they made out, intensely, Chuck taking her neck in his large hand to pull her head closer, her arms around his shoulders, Lyle watching out of the corner of his other eye this time, forearm over his head, still pretending to be half-asleep in the unrelenting summer heat, the sun beating down at 3:00 or so p.m. on a Thursday when half the city was playing hooky just to bake in it?
None of these thoughts occurred to him in the moment, approximately one year ago—it was only that he had to hold himself together, put it in perspective, realize how little the whole thing was, how comical, and to reveal nothing and to breathe. Trixie broke the whole thing off a month later, via text message, a cowardly maneuver Lyle felt, though it made it easier for him to be similarly cowardly, to disappear from her on the condition that she disappear from him, and he had successfully resolved to do exactly that, even on the two occasions when she texted again after the end of the affair, and he simply ghosted, mustering as much contempt and disgust as he could even as he felt in his heart something tender and weak, which he fought with morning jogs and push-ups and Sport and Social Club sixteen-inch softball league meetups over at Horner Park, where he met the dude, Peter, who would introduce him to Madeline.
Through the sunglasses, now, Lyle watches the one-legged stork maiden, reading, her legs strong and glorious, and is relieved she is a perfect stranger, that her nerdy sex appeal is only a whiff, a small possibility, and highly unlikely at that. He might as well enjoy surreptitiously with just a slight ache of longing but not the irrevocable danger of having. And he has not given up his favorite spot here on the sand, and he has Friday-night Second City tickets to share with Madeline, who is fun and smart and clearly a believer in being good and doing good, which is probably good. And then the Loyola blonde brings her leg down and slides her book under her arm. The water sloshes against her calves as she walks toward the pebbly boundary where water and land waver in indecision, then up dry sand to her towel, white and folded into wrinkles at the top-left corner, where she sets herself down to rest, to tan, massive textbook closed at her side.
Lyle slides his eyes back directly overhead and then shuts them, only to have them jolted back open by the sound of shifting sand behind his head. A foot lands just to his right at the level of his shoulder, near where his index finger keeps his place in his paperback, and another young woman, brown-haired and tanned, has emerged from the tall grass behind in a white bikini patterned with flowers and palm leaves. She breaks into a jog toward the water, where she foot-splashes out a few yards and then tosses herself in, a shallow half-dive, and Lyle remembers how a year ago after Chuck and Trixie had finished making out, had gathered themselves and exited the scene, vanishing down the jetty path toward shore, obscured by the tall grass where the jetty swoops and stops the water on one side and sets aside sand on the other, Lyle went into the water, icy despite being late in the summer—must have been something about the currents that day—where he stood for a moment gathering his nerve, then plunged much as this young lady just has, and it was so cold it made him pull his head out immediately and shout, even though the sun beat down so hard, so relentlessly, that he was dry again in the sand within minutes of returning to his towel, turquoise with the seashells. Now he watches the brown-haired girl—probably a student as well, probably had been studying in a patch of sand surrounded by the beach grass where people sometimes make bonfires or grill—as she dunks her head and re-emerges several times, then gathers water into her hands to splash it against her body, rubbing it over her shoulders and in her underarms. She doesn’t look up from the water as she cools and bathers herself, and Lyle looks away, his wrists now on his bent knees, book still dangling from his right hand. A lifeguard dips oars into water, pulling his vessel north.
Jason Mortensen is an editor and writer and sometime musician living in Rogers Park, on the far north side of Chicago. He has two amazing children and a tortoise named Tickle.
Photo Credit: Dr. Benjamin Erlandson is the founder of an ecological educational nonprofit fostering bioregionalism and ecological literacy in service of stewardship across the biosphere. He is an outsider scholar and recovering academic following dynamic inquiry to transcend and defy the disciplines in service of practicing systems wisdom. He is a writer, mapper, photographer, and filmmaker creating multimodal narrative traces in defiance of anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism.
L'Esprit Literary Review 