Inspired by a discussion on Twitter today about the word “gams.” It inspired this little quick vintage-styled piece.

Home

It was Hawaii. Swaying palm trees and beaches and the ocean and warm tropical breezes that were incongruous with what November should be. It was the strange plinking sounds of ukuleles and dusky-skinned girls with straight dark hair who said aloha and called him a haole, in sweet, lilting voices.

But that night at the USO, thousands of miles from Illinois with its frigid air and barren fields buried under massive drifts of snow it was a girl who looked like home who captured Skip’s attention.

All peaches-and-cream skin, honey-blonde hair caught up in a net, and wearing a cherry-red dress that perfectly matched the lips that were turned up in a perpetual grin.

Hot damn, that dress was something else. Not because it was particularly racy or showed anything it shouldn’t. Outside of the color his Grandma would sniff wasn’t appropriate for anything outside a bordello, it was a perfectly respectable dress. Hell, she was even wearing a small, enameled flag pin at her collar. Couldn’t get more respectable than that, no sir.

But there was just something about that dress, mister…  The skirt swirling as she danced, riding up and giving peekaboo glimpses of legs left bare, all the patriotic girls having sacrificed their silk stockings for the war effort. Unlike all the other girls in the canteen, however, her legs were truly bare—she’d eschewed drawing lines up the backs of her legs to give the illusion of seams. And maybe because her legs were so defiantly bare—maybe because she danced tirelessly, with flyboys and squibs alike, showing no preference—he was able to look his fill at what he could only deem the finest pair of gams he’d ever seen in all his nineteen years, and that included the burlesque dancers at that club he and his buddies had visited the night before they shipped out and found themselves here.

In Hawaii.

Where he found himself the night before he was due to ship out again, this time for God only knew where and not knowing when—or even if—he’d ever make it back, and looking at a girl who looked just like home.