Wind and Sail

He sat on a worn, wooden plank embedded in the very edge of the earth where he grew up, feet dripping into the water, sun breaking skin on his neck.

Dance with me, he asked the wind. But the wind never answered anymore.

He packed a lunch, again. A sandwich and two pieces of fruit. Sun sitting lower and lower with the swell of days. He threw pebbles just to see the water move.

"I don't know if I believe you," she said. But that was weeks before and he tried not to think about it anymore. He tried not to think about how the earth didn't feel solid anymore. How years before, when the wind kicked in from the gulf and swirled around them at a pulsating frenzy, they drove through the middle of the night onto the same stretch of wateredge he sat now. Only now the horizon was a painting frozen in time. In his pocket, though, he kept a sail just in case.

He laid his bare back against the worn, wooden plank and pulled his cap over his eyes, senses drifting from quiet sleep to quiet sleep to a sea bird flying over the open water. Hour after hour just waiting. An old couple walked by, picking up shells from the warm sand and throwing some back, not noticing him laying there in the sun.

“Sit right there,” he said to her once. “Right there in the grass. Let me take your picture.” That was years ago when grass was really green. When the softness of the air they breathed could be measured in theater tickets stubs and Irish beers and dirt on bare feet. But he tried not to think about it anymore.

Later, with nothing left of the day or his lunch, he took his feet from the warm water and stood on the last board, toes hanging over edge. Before him, the sea turned from blue to black, stopping at no color in between. Behind him, the sun dropped lower and wider, and it was the moment when he turned to face it, the moment he began to walk home, that he thought he felt a slow rush of air across the hairs on his arms and his legs. But it was nothing, he soon realized, except maybe the red-orange sunset reminding him of something he had tried not to think about for a long time.