Beachcomber

 

​The hotel bar was closed and the liquor store had yet to open. And so, after a few drinks in his room, Gary lay sprawled and sleepless atop the pastel-colored comforter, its synthetic fibers itching his nakedness.

 

Despite being miles from home, he found himself thinking of his girlfriend's pet snake, coiled and dreadful beneath its amber-colored heat lamp.

 

Half-buzzed and increasingly agitated, Gary sat up, slipped into a pair of shorts and applied a second 21 MG nicotine patch to his upper arm.

 

Gary then exited his room, barefoot, and descended the stairs before following the wooden walkway down to the beach. 

 

If he I had a cigarette.

 

It was well-after 3 AM and the ocean's inky waters stretched for miles, only to merge, indeterminably, with bruised sky.

 

And so, Gary walked.

​

He staggered.

 

He let out a cry, stepping onto something razor-sharp.

 

“Is someone there,” a woman called out, her voice disembodied in the darkness, her inquiry, rushing, stinging like saltwater. 

 

“Yes, I’m here," Gary said. 

​

A flashlight flicked on and began to probe the in-between, slashing across his face like an incandescent jellyfish tendril. 

​

​After a moment, a woman materialized before him - a figure, a form, emerging from the night.

​

“I stepped on something,” Gary said, wincing.

​

​"Are you ok?"

 

Blood poured from a gash in his heel, oozing dark-red all over a graveyard of shattered sea shells. 

​

“I have a first aid kit in my truck,” she said. 

 

He wanted to know her. To see her more clearly, to be closer. 

​

The moon pulled at the water. Even the land too, was being stretched, bulging out into the cosmos.

​

"Here, let's go slow," she said as he limped beside her, leaving bloodied footprints in the sand.

 

Once they got to her truck, Gary sat on the tailgate and watched as she poured water over his wound.  

 

Her skin was the color of sand, her eyes, the turquoise of water.  

​

"You'll need to clean this out really good once you get back," she said.

 

​What would he say if I could say anything? 

​

Who would he become if entirely uncoupled from the past?

​

He thought again of the pet snake, its jaw dislodging, swallowing a terrified mouse.

​

​And then, somehow, they were in the cab of the truck, their bodies lit an alien-green by the LED dashboard lights.​

 

Her lips, salty and cracked. Her hair, perfumed with the earthy-smell of tobacco. 

​

He was the mouse inside the snake, being devoured, being digested: body, brains and bone.

 

And, then, it was over. The two of them depleted and collapsed into the truck's bench seat.

​

After a moment, she reached across his lap and opened the glove compartment, offering him a Marlboro.

 

“I’m trying to quit,” Gary said. 

 

Even then, he was disintegrating.

 

His body in service of another.

 

Gary turned his arm to show her the flesh-colored nicotine patch, that despite being well-adhered, intimated that he was to be forever imbalanced, unsatisfied and never quite at home. 

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