On the sand, my jacket laid out beneath us, we make love under the silver full moon. The warm gulf water laps languid and sweet. And the shell tree — a fallen tree that reaches out over the water, on which people hang their collected shells to make a wish — seems to sway and glow. Your skin, your hair, your breath, the feel of you in my arms. This, sad to say, is the only thing I ever really wanted. You always kept your eyes on me when we made love, your hands in my hair, on my back. Our legs wound together like wicker.
It’s the first time; we own ourselves now. Choices are ours to make. I’m still unworthy of you. But this time I’m staying anyway.
Afterward, you pull on my shirt and we sit, staring at the black clouds that drift like wraiths in the night sky.
“Now what?” you say.
“I don’t know,” I admit. It’s complicated. Even I can see that, he who has had no complications in his life — just wanting and getting. “We’ll figure it out. Together.”
You smile and issue a little laugh; it’s a sad, knowing sound. Nothing will be easy moving forward. But maybe, when the dust settles, we’ll be happier than we’ve ever been.
“That’s what you always said. As if the world should bend to our will.”
“And why shouldn’t it?” I say. “Eventually.”
This time your smile is wide and free, like it used to be, with a whole new path ahead of us.
I don’t see him until it’s too late, a figure slipping from the darkness. He must have walked up the beach after us. Now he’s a towering shadow, breath labored. A ghoul. A monster.
None of us say a word.
The gun glints in the moonlight as he raises it and fires. I shield your body with mine.
How many shots?
The sound is deafening, drowning out the world. I walk through the blue doorway of your eyes. There’s only silence.
You. Long limbs graceful, pale in the moonlight. The surf, lapping lazy and warm against the sugar shore. The sky. A void. Stars dying, galaxies spinning, light-years ago, their glimmer reaching us only now when it’s far too late. Our toes disappear in the silken sand, salt on our skin. You’re so still, so near. But always out of reach. Even now.
Extraordinary Things
by Sterling Watson
Pass-a-Grille
Lee Taylor had seen extraordinary things. Not wars, earthquakes, or tidal waves, not the biggest things, but the small ones, some of them delights, some so coincidental that they defied all but his own capacity to believe, and some of them dangerous. He had seen the green ray, and manatees mating, and there was the time the two joggers, beautiful young women, had stepped on the corn snake and their tanned skin had gone instantly pale. And the time he’d stood on the bluff above Troy Springs at sunrise and seen the giant alligator gar, a living torpedo, slip out of the dark water of the Sewanee River into the crystalline spring, and then back into the dark.
It had been his fate, he told people, to see these extraordinary things and have no proof of them because he saw them alone. He told the stories. At parties, to friends, sometimes to women he was interested in at least temporarily. Politeness reigns, mostly, so most people listened politely. When he noticed the onset of boredom, a yawn, he’d say, “No, really, this is true. It really happened.” And polite people, good people, would focus on Lee and his tale, and hear him out to the end.
The woman had called Lee and asked him to meet her. She’d said her name was Helen Trenam, they’d met before, and she thought he’d recognize her when he saw her face. “Would you meet me? Please.”
There was something in that please, a breath of excitement, a hint of come hither.
Excitement had been missing from Lee’s life for some time now, and so, although the strangeness of the woman’s call put him on his guard, as it would any sane man, he said he’d meet her. He made his voice as neutrally pleasant as an excited man could, and said, “Well, sure, all right. I’ll meet you. But... I assume you’ll explain all this a little more fully when I see you.”
“Of course,” the woman said. “You have a right to a full and complete explanation.”
With that, she had him. The thing about Lee’s right to an explanation sounded a little lawyerly, and Lee’s country grandfather had told him to fear God, women, and lawyers, but she had him. This was already an extraordinary thing, and it only promised to grow in that direction.
Lee parked on Pass-a-Grille Beach and looked up at the Hurricane roof bar. Up there, the potted sabal palms waved their fronds in the famous gulf breeze, and the copper parapet reflected the gold of another memorable sunset. Memorable because a volcano in the Yucatán had erupted and the airborne debris was doing something to the light. The volcano had been dormant for seven thousand years.
Laughter and music drifted down. The music was easy listening, but the laughter was high and giddy and desperate. It had been bottled in frozen Detroit and windy Chicago and flown to Florida to be released in pricey hotel rooms and restaurants and bars, and now suddenly, late on a Sunday, it had to be rationed. Lee crossed Gulf Way and took the elevator up to the roof.
He didn’t see a woman who looked like she might be looking for him in the naked-as-you-wanna-be crowd. A man the size of a sumo wrestler sat at the bar in a brown polyester suit. Empty seats on both sides of him. Lee took one of them.
The man turned, smiled, extended a meaty hand. “Hey there, buddy, how you doing? My name’s Frank Dross.”
Lee had learned a long time ago that people who sat alone in bars were expected to talk to any and all who might sit near them. Though by no means a chronic habitué of bars, he was often a man alone, and he’d learned the ropes, how to keep it friendly, avoid politics and religion, and offer nothing too personal. He’d told some extraordinary stories to strangers in bars.
Lee shook the man’s nine-pound hand. “I’m fine.” Although not your buddy, not yet anyway. “Name’s Lee Taylor.” He shifted on the barstool so he could keep an eye on the elevator door.
The bartender brought Frank Dross a second bourbon. “What’s your poison?” Dross said to Lee. “Let me stand you one.”
Lee thanked him and ordered Bacardi and lime. It came with a paper umbrella. The bartender was a trim, cheaply handsome kid with a copper-penny tan and a seen-it-all expression. His name tag said, Fred. Tacoma, Washington. The Hurricane’s policy was that everybody in Florida came from somewhere else, and they had a lot of name tags to prove it. Lee’s would have read, Lee Taylor. Vanished, Florida.
Lee and Frank Dross talked small for a while, Lee only half-involved, one eye on the elevator. They stopped talking when a cheer erupted from the crowd. The T-back bikinis and Speedos parted and a guy in a sandwich board — and very little else — moved into the center of the Hurricane. The board was white with black lettering. The shoulder straps could have been old seat belts. The guy was about thirty-five with an average face. He’d spent enough time making love to his NordicTrack to look pretty good in a pair of Calvin Klein silk boxer shorts, a paisley bow tie, flip-flops, and the sandwich board. The boxer shorts still held their packaged-at-the-factory creases and an Inspected by Number 17 sticker.