Red Sky at Morning

Carey stared at me from the corner of the room, chiding me for reading (The Strange Case of Jekyll and Hyde, which I never finished). I ignored her while she paged through my parents’ coffee table magazines: Nantucket Yacht and an untouched Parenting. She slammed them shut, stood up and glared at me.

“What’s the point?” she sputtered, exasperated and wild-eyed, watercolor sunburn splotches down her legs from a haphazard sunscreen application the day before. I looked up from my book. In her left hand, she held a plastic beach toy: a forlorn purple profile of a fish. It was a sad, bloated shape that ballooned and bulged a misshapen tumor tail, its lips puckered in expectation like the punks at our last middle school dance. It looked frozen in shock, with a final one-eyed look of powerless recognition of fate: Caesar’s final gaze as Brutus dealt the hardest blow.

“Come on, Hen!” She shook my arm. Carey was strong: a skin-and-bone arm wrestling champion. “Hen”, short for Henry, simultaneously belittling and endearing, which she loved. She was older by a month and taller by two inches, information volunteered unprompted (“cross my heart it’s closer to two-and-a-half inches”) with enough vigor for both of us. Once, while eating our split ham and cheese on the beach, I pointed out a drip of mayonnaise on her chin. She replied that she intended it to be there and refused to wipe it off for the rest of the meal.

I smirked. “Fine.” Book closed. “What are we doing?” But we did the same thing every day. Summer vacation. Too young to do much of anything, too old to sit at home.

She clapped me over the head with the fish. “Follow me.” She spun on her bare feet and walked out with face-forward determination, knowing I’d run to catch up before she walked halfway down the street.

* * *

The beach was our kingdom. More accurately, Carey’s kingdom and she was king, not queen. With seaweed crown and driftwood staff she carried herself with an awkward, spasmodic regality, shouting orders and castigating her subjects: banishing pearl-less oysters, relegating king crab to court jester.

It was hard to distinguish most days from others. Sunshine, honeysuckle and turquoise sea glass; convincing my mother to pack lunch for two (one sandwich, a party-size bag of chips, a carton of OJ, two fun-size Twix bars), bruises that seemingly appeared from nowhere, round rocks we tried to skip but that often plopped in refusal, the smell of sunscreen and sweat.

We sat atop the steep sand throne and looked down below, across the stretch of beach and water. It was early in the season, a cool day in early June. I don’t think I would have jumped in even if my bones could stand it.

Carey paced the peak of the dune, surveying her dominion as if it were a hundred feet below. I made sad fish imprints in the sand with the toy; mute and purple with that cyclops eye wide, unable to warn you about the sea monster behind your back, impossible to change its hopeless view of things.

“Henry,” she commanded, inflection rising on the last syllable in a proper British accent. Wind swept the paint-splattered patches of seagrass along the dune. I looked up from my petrified fish platoon to see the staff lifted high above her head. I winced and held up my hand in defense. How had I offended the king today? And it was only 10am?

A moment. She rested the driftwood on the crown of my head and said, “Sir Henry, for courage so pure and deeds so bold. Knight of my Kingdom.” I smirked and grabbed the staff, throwing it aside (“Treason, Sir Henry! Treason!”) and jumped on her. She fumbled for footing, my arms wrangled around her neck and feet around her waist (“Guards!”). I seized her crown in hasty revolt and placed it askew on my head. She careened to the edge, left leg tangled up in right; we fell in slow motion (did my lips graze her cheek?) and thumped on impact, plunging down the hill.

We barrel-rolled, tangled, swirled images of sea and sand bled into one another. Blue sand, white ocean, red sky.

I landed with a muffled thud, the right side of my face glued to the beach. Lifting my head, I sputtered laughter, sand-spit spewing from my mouth. My right rib panged, and I looked down to see a viscous trickle of sand-blood flowing down my abdomen. I winced.

Carey lay limp beside me. I prodded her. “Carey.” Lifeless. I observed her. “Not funny, Carey.” I threw half-broken sea shells at her back. Nothing. Repeating, louder, “Carey.” And I wanted her name to be longer, to have a fuller sound, as though perhaps a third syllable would be the one to wake her.

The ocean continued to splash sea and salt, low waves crashing in a white noise that accentuated the silence on the beach.

I shifted to look back to the towering dune. Lifting my legs from my seated inspection, I stepped back, climbing the dune backwards to face toward Carey’s contorted form. At the top, I retrieved the plastic fish, my imprinted fortune-telling fish legion staring at me: “We tried to tell you.”

Back at the shoreline, bedsheet of white foam erasing my footsteps, I flung the fish into the water and watched the piece of floating purple plastic wash out to sea. A fish that couldn’t swim, only drift, climbing the crest of a wave in a dead man’s float.

I walked home alone. An unnaturally wide smile shined from the toddler on this month’s Parenting on the doorstep.

And then gray bedroom, blue fog sleep. Numbness: something and nothing, my entire body like a fallen-asleep foot.

Written by: Gregory Duffy

Photo by: Daniel Charles Ross

Things That Went Missing

I remember redwood picnic tables, still wet from the rain on a Sunday morning before the dogs and nude sunbathers came out. You weren't there to see, gone missing. Microscopic creatures swarmed like jellyfish in puddles although the shore was 100 feet away.

And I never wanted to lay a hand on you. The things that went missing were the things we never had a hand on in the first place. The things nibbling at the edges of our imaginations that were not to become tangible, or completely visible with the naked eye. Neither knowable, nor close enough to tear apart or off.

Maybe we didn't see the things that stood right before our eyes. The things that were visible were the ones that disappeared first, without being missed, in the light evening of an undiscovered promise, the summer night of a California beach with water too cold to skinny-dip with strangers. We obsessed over what wasn't there, and took for granted what was there all along.

I saw you in your red underthings doubling as a bathing suit. A cool breeze swirled the aluminum torches along the patio edges, with laughter and unheard insults floating across the beach in choppy whispers. The bonfires lit in dancing crescents, the bronze bodies with nylon stitching, and a backbone of fiberglass surfboards hatcheted into the sand like a prehistoric animal with no ancestors. With no future past August.

The things that went missing were never offered. The air teased the elastic of our flirtations as you picked sand from between my toes with our legs crossed in artificial modesty, up on the bamboo railing. I saw you looking. And the apocalypse of the tide made my memory obsolete.

You blamed your brother for the ride you missed. Ochre smoke hung innocently on the inseams of your bathing suit. The nylon of the jacket held just so but was safety-pinned in a secret place to preserve the illusion. The beach was suddenly empty. The pepper lights hung on a wire that squeaked in the salt wind.

The things that went missing were the ones we weren't paying attention to. The price of gas that made Chet stop driving the Cadillac. The storage shed filled with mother’s photo albums, grown dank and green. Your desperate hold on the neck of a Guinness, stolen from the bottle shop. Fresh-caught fish on a line, smiling and circling in the pails.

We saved them from the shark surf. Later you would fry them over phonebook flames with a steel claw made of hangers, like evidence you were determined to destroy.

The promise of summer, paved in gilt-edged bible pages, seduced me into unwinding the regrets you never replayed for me. You only agreed to see me when everyone else was gone. The sunset burned the smog into unnatural colors. And the windshield filtered the light in that starving morning, bringing a touch to your skin and the hidden elastic below the fold, discarded on the backseat floor. The crease left wet, your silent tear glistening along the cheeks that still burned with the force of that accidental reversal.

The things that went missing were a foreshadowing of our death and of the birth. The religious poise of a creature, found floating towards deeper water, the wave of a new world simple in its proposal and fertile grace. Missing were the things never seen. My stories were jokes you didn't hear, the punchlines an insult they took the wrong way, your secret an opportunity you'd backed into by accident. You let him watch you change in the shower stalls down by the lifeguard station after the festival.

I'd have worn a mask to enter your light, splintered with styrofoam vertebrae and warmed by the driftwood furnace. But I was up on the hill overlooking the summer houses built deep in the shale, and the plan fell in the vast sea of night. My plan drowned by Poseidon, lost beyond Apollo, in the parking lot of the Scop Cafe in the backseat of the Cadillac, whispered at lunchtime the following Monday.

Did I tell you? The sharks went hungry.

Your indignation was a pose against this Sodom and Gomorrah business, that Guernica night that began as it ended, a grand embrace of our last night alone, the desperate attempt to find what had already gone missing, your smiling teeth dark in the shadow, a trick of the flame while tequila smoke coiled from the cement rings on the dirty sand like a broken necklace, spilled in an amorous struggle.

Butts and pop tops and clear plastic wrappers. The slow curves pitched with duckweed that damselflies swarm around like high school. I lit the flame and you let him have it. I wore another suit of clothes. Last call before we take inventory of the supplies.

The things that went missing had to be reconstructed later in a hand-held reading where I passed my own poem over to let someone else read, with broken rhythms I had no way to put my hand on, to twist back in shape.

Waist ties poked in my thighs at the joint. I imagined the burn of your hand for hours. The color was an illusion of the printer, and should not reflect your final result. Once you live by the coast, you never get it out of your blood. Grains of sand circled at the bottom of the empty shower stall, beads of glass a blind memory of something never consummated.

The man with the orange blazer would hose it down come winter, during the rains. At the naked clearing dotted with redwood picnic tables, I held you down to make you confess, holding the lapels of someone else's windbreaker, which you tore off then never reclaimed.

It fell apart that August. The things that went missing were not there to begin with.


Written by: Roger Leatherwood
Photograph by: Garrett Carroll

Sunset

The Sunrise Recreation Center didn't make you wear any kind of uniform. They issued t-shirts, mostly second-hand short sleeves from Goodwill that they'd stenciled their name over. It was up to you to find the size closest to your fit in the pile at the beginning of summer.

The counselors could barely be distinguished from the tourists and the high-schoolers when they went out on field trips. The first hint was they all wore whistles around their necks. Some of the shirts were plain white undershirts, cut for men. Then one of the board members found a gross of used red t-shirts from an old sporting club downtown, which were issued to us in the first week of August.

Because of the shirts' uniformity, along with their abundance, they unofficially changed the name of the rec center to Sunset. Same difference. There was no sign out front anyway. We had a temporary office in the gym next to the First Presbyterian Church in Seaside.

Although I finally looked like I belonged, I never got used to the change, and I kept finding reminders of the old name for the rest of the summer. On stationery, or written in sharpie on volleyballs and ice chests.

I spent more and more time in the offices, away from the noise and the whirlpool of touch football games and the teenage politics among the rest of the staff. There was never going to be a better time to replace those blue Havaianas flip-flops. I was moving to Alaska in the fall, and the dog had chewed them both at one time or another to varying degrees. I'd buy some canvas deck shoes, espadrilles, to keep out the water and the cold.

The fine purple sand of Big Sur got between my toes when I walked the beach at high tide, up by the duckweed where it wasn't packed down and damp. The purple color came from the eroded quartz and manganese garnet that had been washing downstream into the surf for eons. The beach, particularly when wet, took on a translucent hue, made up of a million grains of glass that caught light off the water, like a stagnant pond turning oily, a chemical rainbow at sunset.

The officials had posted warning signs, but the teenagers still went out there to make out and smoke dope. It looked dark and featureless at night, and more than one teenager had lost their footing and drowned during the cold autumn months.

I wouldn't have to get a new bathing suit. The light in Alaska wouldn't catch the mica in the sand in the same way, and the temperature of the water would keep me out as well, regardless of the coverage or the material I wore.

The old one no longer fit me, being as it was one of those one-piece modest types. My step-father picked it out for me one summer in grade school, telling me two-pieces weren’t for swimming. I think he was trying to keep me as young and innocent-looking as possible, for as long as possible but I also sensed he was protecting himself from my increasingly ripening puberty and the temptation it posed for him. While the one-piece covered all provocative skin zones, it also grew tight as I bloomed. I never felt comfortable alone in the house with him.

That wet-suit I would find myself in would prevent any untoward thoughts, from him or from the instructors in Alaska who might take my arm or waist when helping me into or out of a kayak.

The protection, and the warmth, would also help me when I started at the tourist bureau in Nome. Ex-patriots and outsiders still streamed into Alaska chasing the promise of pipeline jobs, fishing boat riches, and the promise of the open space. I didn't want to work that hard for so little gold. Someone had to serve the miners their breakfasts.

And, I didn't tell Jess what my plans were. He'd invited me to his parents' house up in the bluff while they were away in San Francisco. He was more interested in writing a screenplay and telling me his old jokes, barbecuing plank steaks and enjoying his last chance to feel like he wasn't obligated to turn something in, or be anyplace at a specific time.

Possibly, he would invite Brittany and Molly, or Steve over for another long weekend. Or he would turn on the charm and the Maroon 5, and try to get me naked again in his hot tub. Jess was living in a dream, and the best dreams don't have a resolution or end, they just burn off in the sun. He was going to Brown, and his dad would make sure that if he ever really was jerked out of his drifting, it would be an awakening as soft and painless as he could make it.

At the end of the summer, the kids started dropping out early, before the actual end of camp. Some for last-minute vacations, others because the funds didn't last, or the water got too cold, or their inherited intolerance to the sun and the mosquitoes got to be too much.

The days were growing shorter. The water around Big Sur got choppy this time of year. In Alaska, because of the cove surrounding Golovnin Bay, in the Norton Sound, I heard the water was always preternaturally calm. They told me the days were long in summer, and the sun never completely fell below the horizon. It never quite got dark. All winter, it seemed like it was always sunset.


Written by: Roger Leatherwood
Photograph by: Anthony Delanoix

Life's a beach

A crashing wave rushes towards the shore, leaving a young girl curled up on the sand in its wake. The child opens her eyes and takes in her surroundings as the foamy water retreats to the horizon.

She pushes her elbow into the soggy ground and peels herself from the earth like the skin of an orange as another wave crashes in the distance. She rolls over onto her knees and trudges towards the Beachgrass gates lining the bright-white dunes.

She explores the terrain on all fours, astounded by every handprint and knee dent she leaves in the landscape. She giggles each time her tiny digits disappear beneath the supple surface that’s cradling her fragile figure.

The land hardens as the girl travels farther from the water line and her gleeful laughter turns into grunts of frustration. She pauses for a moment and studies the fading trail of prints leading back to the ocean. Her youthful smile morphs into a look of panic once she realizes her place between the water and the dunes.

She turns to the left and sees a young boy constructing a tiny castle from the same sand that’s resting beneath her. She lifts her hand and plunges her rigid fingers into the topsoil, signifying the groundbreaking of her new project.

She defines her property with a trench, much like the border surrounding her neighbor’s construction zone. She then piles the displaced sand in the center of her territory and contemplates what shape the elements should take.

Her eyes lock on a condominium towering over the coast. She makes note of every detail, from the scalloped columns spanning the height of the building to the golden lion statue eclipsing the sun from above the penthouse.

She shapes the mound of eroded shells into something resembling the colossal structure that’s casting shadows over the ocean like a sundial. Cloaked by the shade of the condominium, the little girl pats and smoothes the sand into a rectangle so tall, she’s forced to stand on her toes and blindly level the roof with her outstretched fingers.

The weight of gravity wears on her forefeet and she returns her heels to the sand, cursing her height for hampering her productivity. She sits with her back against her unfinished project and calculates how long she has until the salty waves breach her barricades. She crosses her arms on her knees, lowers her head and weeps, as if collapsing under the pressure of time.

Her sulking is interrupted by a hand on her shoulder. She looks up to find a tall girl silhouetted by the sun. The stranger’s braid ticks back and forth between her shoulder blades like the pendulum of a grandfather clock as she peers over the top of the castle. She effortlessly pats down all the unreached bumps and the little girl joyfully kneels and starts pinching cylinders up and down the sides of her tower.

The two girls laugh and sing as their building expands in every direction. Somewhere in the midst of all the digging and rezoning, their worksite merges with her pint-sized competitor’s. After a playful exchange of accusations, the girl and boy decide to join their castles into one massive estate.

As the sun fell from the clouds and the water crept up the shore, the young boy, the little girl, her taller friend and some newfound acquaintances continued inventing new tasks to ignore the persistent march of time. The turrets rose higher, the moat dipped lower and every wall of the castle was covered in embellishments reflective of their maker.

The little girl continued perfecting her masterpiece as, one by one, her colleagues were summoned to the dunes. She only allowed herself a brief moment of grief as she watched each cohort approach the bright light of the setting sun.

She kept busy until it was time for her tall companion to answer the call echoing from beyond the Beachgrass gates. The little girl watched as her closest friend walked away from their castle, her braid now resting motionlessly down the center of her back.

As she waved goodbye, the little girl noticed swells of wrinkles crashing along the back of her hand. She studied the ripples until the young boy took her weathered palm and helped her to her feet. He led her alongside their estate until they reached the frail sand at the foot of the dunes, each mound resembling the bottom half of a depleted hourglass.

They turned and watched as a wave from the rising tide cascaded over the edge of their boundary, occupying every crevice of the trench like milk on a tile floor. Another wave filled what remained of the moat as the young boy’s hand slipped from the little girl’s grasp. She stood there, alone, reminiscing on everything she and her friends had created.

As another wave surged towards her castle, the little girl searched for the condominium she had set out to replicate. She spotted the golden lion statue staring out over the water and began comparing the buildings. She was shocked by how far she had strayed from her blueprint, but even more so by how little she cared.

The endless layers of perfectly aligned balconies now seemed cold and lifeless next to the dissimilar terraces constructed by her and her friends. Even the great lion whose chin touched the clouds wore a somber expression without the luminance of the midday sun amplifying its features.

The little girl smiled. She took a final look at her castle, turned and walked peacefully towards the dunes. Waves continued battering the sculpted terrain until it returned to a flat patch of land with no signs of the little girl’s labor of love, hardship and friendship.

The sun rose the following morning and a crashing wave rushed towards the shore, leaving a young boy curled up on the sand in its wake. He opened his eyes, peeled himself from the earth and began his journey to the dunes.



Written by: Mark Killian
Photograph by: Emily Blincoe