C4 antho - Chamber Four

~234~ The Chamber Four Fiction Anthology
Sharon realized she was a little taller than Munro. She
had never before been together with a man shorter than she.
She looked him over. He wasn’t a big man.
“I guess you’re not quite built like a football player, at
that,” she said.
“You are. Those broad shoulders. Those strong legs.
You’d have made a beautiful football player.”
“So, do you think I could have joined the team?” Sharon
asked him.
Munro laughed.
“I don’t know,” he said. “The fellows would have been all
for it, I know that. But this was years ago, remember. Before
you were born. Coach had a rule against four-legged showers.”
“Four-legged showers?” Sharon said. “So, is this a fourlegged
shower we’re having?”
“You bet.”
Sharon giggled. “A four-legged shower,” she said. “I like
that. That’s pretty funny.”
“Coach thought so,” said Munro.
* * * *
After Christmas the real winter, the leaden New York
winter, took enduring hold, grimly, like a sentence you had
to serve, like long, hard time you had to do, day after day
after day. The cloud and fog and dirt and noise hung low
over the avenues, and along them the lights of the shop windows
poured a wet, dripping sheen over the streets and over
the traffic in the streets so that Sharon, making her way to
work every day from Kew Gardens, felt as though she were
going down a mine.