Broken Ocean

The ocean broke, slate gray, against blue pebbles on the shore. Every hour around the clock, they slammed with irritating regularity against the ground, with all of the inordinate precision of nature.

"I like it here. You can, like, feel the waves."

Rob had a way of dividing the manila folders of his mind, case by case, until the sun shone.

"Dude, it's too cold to swim. Got a light?"

He had pocketed a cheaper alternative that morning; one match glowed in the encroaching darkness.

"Thanks. Wanna toke?"

He didn't want a toke. The tone of the evening, already perfectly surreal, couldn't have been improved by an hallucinogen. But he didn't need anything to mask the truth of what he had done; picked Rob up at a bar, fucked him in his suite, and then split between them a good rye sandwhich and a beer. He felt like a fisherman on a holiday, stuck in the sixties with it's one-night-stands and cableknit white sweaters. Rob, though clearly not Sandy Dennis, still seemed enough of the adventurous pixie hippie type to feed his partner's delusions.

"You've got lube on your fingers, man."

Quite sure that he didn't, he glanced at his hand; bone dry. Rob still found this a wonderful joke, his laughter cresting over the rush of the ocean like a bird's call.

"Made you look!"

That joke, quickly and with little mess, encapsulated what sort of person Rob was. Silly. He appealed to the pieces of Shane which weren't buttoned down by flannel, the undomesticated side that still wore football jerseys and caught him calling his friends 'homes.'

Rob was dancing, seemingly unaware of Shane now, the joy of his buzz erasing anything but the voices in his mind. The intimacy between them had been dispelled, but Shane still watched. And he was smiling.

They sepparated where the ocean met the land, just as water and sand, and as he had expected. But that small, temporal joy held more meaning for Shane than he had expected.

The beach had begun to pull away from its shore; shells and sea glass appearing randomly, as though scattered by a maiden's hand. A child's red shoe, vertical in the dunes, waited lonely for its companion. He noticed these things and more, as the fog lifted its veil.


The End