Chloe Jean: Siren of the Skies

His family lived on a farm briefly when he was a kid, back when his accountant father and architect mother decided to abandon the New York City bedrock for the more tender bed of soil abundant in the Midwest. It was there that he spotted his first love, Chloe Jean, cutting a swath across the sky over their crops. The young woman crop dusted all of the properties in Jefferson County since her father had developed glaucoma when she was sixteen. Chloe Jean. Her name was on the lips of every man watching her dip and weave over the fields, misting a cloud of insecticide over the waiting plants. She was pretty, that particular kind of wholesome, healthy, white teeth pretty that farm country tends to breed. The town believed the only reason she was still unmarried was that she spent more time in the sky than on the ground, and nobody could catch her.

Chloe Jean. Even years later, just saying her name conjured the image of the young beauty buzzing low overhead, summer dress and scarf trailing in the wind. When he was thirteen, how many nights did he fantasize about sneaking off with her, taking to the skies, a stowaway in the cockpit between her thighs? He rode his bike to the landing strip at her father’s farm and hid away at the side of the hangar to watch her climb in or out of the cockpit, just in hope of catching a glimpse of leg or swelling breast beneath her summer dress. She was always smiling when she climbed in or out of the plane, the same kind of smile when a woman gazed into the eyes of a man she loved, but for Chloe Jean, it was reserved only for her plane.

He was in chemistry class when everyone heard the fire trucks and crowded by the window. A thin trail of black smoke curled into the sky over Peterson’s farm. Chloe Jean, the first love of his life, crashed and burned in a bean field. Investigators later determined that a tree limb at the border of the field had clipped her wing. For years afterward, boys from town kept a shrine in her memory at the trunk of the massive oak. He considered, several times, hanging himself from one of its limbs. He still feels, unreasonably, somehow less a man for not having done it.