Things Brought In With The Tide (shortened)

This is the previous post, but shortened to 500 words--the original was 658. I'm thinking of submitting it to a 500 word story place thing, so this is my attempt. I think it holds up well, even missing 25% or so of its original length.

He stood on the beach and watched the waves drag filth onto the shore.

He’d left his sunglasses in the car and had to rely on an old St. Louis cap to shield his eyes. He squinted into the sunset and tried to ignore the waves lapping at his toes and wetting the bottoms of his jeans. He’d been here for some time; everyone else had left. The water was cold and made him shiver.

Seaweed patterned the wet sand, sometimes accented by the smooth, pale limbs of deserted driftwood. He saw trash in places. It was comforting to think that so many things loose and lost at sea could be returned by something as precise and mechanical as the tide. Chance aided by structure--there was still an order to things.

He knelt and lifted a shell out of the sand, felt the grit rough upon his fingers. The shell was almost blue and little patterns ran across it, like waves seen from a plane flying above the ocean. He threw the shell out to sea. After a time, it too would be returned to the shore, perhaps whole, perhaps as grains of fine blue sand.

Standing back from the encroaching waves, he walked up the beach, the sun at his back, his shadow disfigured against the sloping dunes. He found the path again with little effort.

He stopped at the parking lot. She sat Indian style on the hood of his car. The rest of the lot was empty. He sighed, looked around. She was supposed to be gone, too.

“Hey, Harrison,” she said. She extended her legs and slid off before standing by the driver’s door, her left arm at her side, her right one across her stomach to hold the other at the elbow. Her hair was in a ponytail and she was sunburned. She had put her other clothes on over her bathing suit.

He could still hear the waves. If he turned around, it would take only a few moments to run into the water, and then he could swim out until he was loose and lost in the middle of the ocean with nothing to do but be caught in the tugging of a tide that would eventually carry him back to shore.

She shifted on her feet and hugged her chest. He looked at her, still squinting, though he no longer knew whether from the hours spent on the beach or the falling darkness. He realized his hands were in his pockets, and that made him notice the chill in the air. A breeze blew up off the shore and he saw her shiver.

There was nothing to say. He walked to her and put his arms around her, held her close, rested his chin on her head as her arms hooked together around his back. They stood like that as the sun disappeared into the ocean and the waves continued to return the things that had been lost at sea.