Things Brought In With The Tide

Here's something from the old blog; I'd forgotten about it, and I like it. (658 words; see above post for reference/explanation.)

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 baseball cap to shield his eyes. It didn’t work very well. 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, long after everyone else had left. He hadn’t yet found a reason to leave. The water was cold and made him shiver.


Seaweed lay in intricate patterns along the wet sand, sometimes accented by the smooth, pale limbs of deserted driftwood. He saw trash in places. It was comforting, to him, to think that so many things loose and lost at sea could be returned by something as precise and mechanical as the tide. It was chance aided by structure. It made sense. It showed him that there was still some kind of order to things.


He turned his head and saw his shadow stretched out long behind him, cast onto the dunes and hardy reeds that grew there. He didn’t see much else. This beach was quiet and very much alone.


He knelt and lifted a shell out of the sand, turned it over in his hands, felt the grit rough upon his fingers. The shell was almost blue and little patterns ran across it, patterns that looked 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.


He’d been here long enough. Standing back from the encroaching waves, he walked up the beach, the sun at his back, his shadow now before him and disfigured against the sloping dunes. He found the path again with little effort; it wasn’t too dark, yet.


He stopped when he reached the parking lot. She sat on the hood of his car, Indian style, leaning against the front pane. The rest of the lot was empty. She was the only other person there.


“Hey, Harrison,” she said. She extended her legs and slid off the car 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 her face was red from the sun. She had put her other clothes on over her bathing suit.


He didn’t respond, at first, because she wasn’t supposed to be there. He stood where the sandy path met the concrete of the parking lot, running things over in his mind, thinking but not really thinking at all. If he listened closely he could hear waves on the shore. If he turned around, it would take him only a few seconds to run into the water, and then he could swim out as far as he was able, swim 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 both arms to her chest. He looked at her, his eyes still squinted, though whether from the hours spent on the shore or the gradually falling darkness he didn’t know. 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 for him 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.