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He stands on a sea-cliff, the spray from the waves carried to his face and soaking it, droplets growing and sliding off.
He’s of an age where you can’t quite say exactly how old he is; a care-worn thirty-something, or a well-preserved fifty-something, or perhaps an average forty-year-old. His hairline’s beginning to recede, and it’s easy to imagine him frowning at this development, deepening the lines in his brow. He’s tall enough to be menacing if he gets angry, but right now, he’s nothing more than average height.
He sets down the shopping bag he’d been carrying, and begins picking objects one by one, and tossing them into the uncaring sea.
Book after book go first, violently rippling as they fall, pages ripping off and dancing in the air, snippets of stories of princesses, resourceful children, and mischievous anthromorphic animals.
A succession of dolls suffer the fall next, all bright-eyed and smiling, all bedecked in dresses and frills and ribbons, except for one, which is petulant and sexualized, dressed in low pants and a belly shirt; this one is thrown with particular vigor.
A large tied-off garbage bag collides with the rock face on it’s way down, the bag tearing, yet not ejecting it’s contents until it collides with the sea. Pink glittery t-shirts and a small child’s blue dress float briefly on top of the water before being swept out of the man’s line of sight, to be wrapped around rocks on the shore or sunk to dance on the sea’s currents.
The blanket is the hardest one. It’s thrown three times, each time catching the wind and billowing defiantly back towards the cliff tops, each time being snatched up and thrown back. He finally ties it around a rock, and the plucky blanket falls into it’s watery resting place.
The bag’s almost empty now; he removes the final object. He hefts it, looking at it for a long time, seeing himself in the reflection. He finally grabs it by the handle and angrily throws it away. It spins as it arcs, sharp and deadly.
He reaches into his breast pocket and pulls out a carefully folded piece of paper. He unfolds it, looking at the colorful creation. A pair of childish approximations stand hand in hand, one significantly shorter than the other. A messy hand has written “To Jary” across the top, a cute misspelling.
He crumples the paper, then brings the closed hand to his face, wiping the accumulated sea-spray from his eyes. He looks at the hand again, then back out across the waves. He puts the now-crumpled picture back into his pocket, and smiles slightly.
A gust of wind snags the now-empty bag and carries it up and back, away from the sea. He watches it, the brief smile gone again, until it disappears from view behind a hill. As if cued, he turns and leaves.
He doesn’t look back.
 Jelloarm · Fri Nov 30, 2007 @ 01:52am · 3 Comments |
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