There's an ice cream truck here, built from what looks like an old parking meter truck, the type with a motorcycle chassis, but with a cab and cargo area like a pickup truck. A large cooler has been fitted to a flat spot in back, and covered with the traditional faded stickers advertising ghosts of ice cream bars, popsicles, drumsticks, snowballs.
In the time and place I grew up, ice cream trucks were fashioned out of old delivery vans, bread trucks, and milk trucks, and the ice cream dealt out of a large window cut in the side of the vehicle. We craned our necks to see the chest and head and hands of the ice cream man (or woman). If we were very small, we'd see only the hands that took our grubby money and returned the fantastic concoctions of frozen milk and sugar, wrapped in quickly-discarded bright packaging. We wondered what was in those trucks; where did the ice cream come from?
Now, seeing this open-air ice cream truck -- more like an ice cream motorcycle -- I can see his whole body, not just hands. He is more human than a god now, more human than we children expect him to be. He reaches into a box, rummaging for the perfect ice cream sandwich, but the mystique of the unseen interior of the ice cream trucks of my dreams drips away, sticking to my fingers and knees, like a forgotten popsicle in the hot sun.
This story appears in the anthology Coffeehouse: Writings From The Web, available at your local bookstore, and now, on the Web.