by J.W. Carey
* * *
The laughter was fierce and honest, if a little cruel. The crowd of children came past in some desperately important footrace, the winner earning praise and recognition and a permanent adulation, whilst the loser would reside in shame and ignominy for the remainder of their life. The flat-footed tread of their sandals whipping against their heels was a rhythm, a simple sound to accompany the seagulls and the waves and the distant sound of traffic beneath the illumination. It was the sound of the dying summer, of the last of the lights before desperation took hold.
The sun was setting now, the orange light shifting into red. The sky was a patina for some abstraction, the clouds aflame with colour above the tinted water. He imagined some beautiful woman, her tongue emerging from the corner of her lips as though she could taste the form of her art, applying careful dyes to thick paper, rejoicing in the simple act of creation. He put most of his weight on the pushchair, letting the wheels leave long grooves in the sand, marking his passage like children in a forest. The hotel was some distance away, further along the shoreline, and he had found it necessary to drive here, that they might enjoy his favourite part of the beach. It was around here that he had first met his wife, first seen her olive-tinted flesh emerging from the water like a Goddess come to judge the world of men. He had joked with her once that, when she eventually tired of him, she would return here to descend back to her Atlantean civilisation, to bring them warnings of the surface dwellers. She had laughed at him, of course she had, but he felt some truth in his idle words.
The bag was heavy on his shoulder, less for the physical weight and more for the guilt contained within. He didn’t know when, exactly, the urge to destroy it all had come to him; no doubt in the midst of one empty night with his feet sweating beneath the overabundance of duvet. She wasn’t there to steal it all anymore. Unbidden, he felt tears well and blinked them back. Instead, he smiled at the sun, at the children screeching past and the young couples walking in the distance their hands clasped tightly for fear that the other might disappear.
He paused at one spot, close to where a boulder emerged from the sand at a disjointed angle. He breathed in deeply, longing for the scent of the ocean to strike him with renewed freshness, but the smell of vinegar and salt was too strong, wafting from the road that ran along the shore. The sickly sweetness of cotton candy reached him, no doubt from the pier in the distance, upon which an oversized wheel resided, illuminated with gay lights and spinning colour.
He let go of the handles in the shade of the rock and after checking upon its occupant, he found himself at the shore. His feet were wet, his jeans rolled to halfway up his calf, and he felt sand between his toes. For a moment he felt like a child again, deliberately crushing his feet into the wetness for the joy of sensation, for the simple amazement of feeling. He unslung the bag and lowered himself to one knee. The string was tied tightly and he refused to undo it, despite his sudden desires to the alternative. He didn’t need to, really, he could still picture the contents. Lain on top, like a body at a pyre, were the Polaroids. Each one was a picture of the two of them, on holiday, at some party neither of them desired to attend, or simply curled together in bed. Despite her protestations, she looked her best when without makeup, when her hair was jutting from her head in angles to defy gravity and her eyes glittered with fresh exhaustion. That image was burnt into his eyelids, the shoulder strap of her vest top slipping over one shoulder, her collarbone jutting into the sunlight from the corner of the room. He remembered thinking how often the light was a wasted journey, how it travelled unfathomable distances to land on this slice of rock they call a planet but, on that day, that one stream of light could have made the journey a thousand times over and it would still have been worth it, simply to curve between her collar and her shoulder.
Beneath the pictures there was a small ribbon-tied bag with a ring in it, a silver circle inlayed with pink-gold and marked with a simple line of cheap diamonds, all he had been able to afford at the time. He had almost sold it twice but, each time, he had found his feet mysteriously diverted by some unknowable will, by some ingrained refusal of physical need.
At the bottom, hidden within a plastic bag from the glittering eyes of those images, the box containing the collection he had spent the last months of his life cultivating squatted like an anchor. The tablets, sachets of powder and liquid containers weighed more than the mere sum of their parts. They were the weight, they were the harness around his throat. He tried not to think about them, tried not to wonder why they were the things he felt guilty for destroying, for sacrificing to the gods of the sea. He drew his arm back and launched the thing into the air, almost tumbling into the water as he did so. It seemed unwilling to leave his grasp, to leave the world of men and clung to the flesh of his palm for moments after he had released it. He watched it bathe in the red lights, watched it like cancer patient watches the poison crawling into their blood, and then it was gone.
He stood there for a time, just long enough to make certain the satchel did not rise again, an assassin watching a recent kill. He returned to boulder and unclipped his companion from the seat. They leant against the rock as he held him in his arms. It dug uncomfortably into the back of his legs, and he already began to feel light-headed at the weight of his actions.
The child’s hair was soft against his clean-shaven cheek, and warmer than the sun ahead of them. His son’s breath was sweat, overriding the scents of humanity and nature together and, for the first time in months, he felt free.