1000 word theme challenge “If Only I Hadn’t” – fiction entry, Santa Barbara Writers Conference 6-22-07 thru 6-29 -- [won an Honorable Mention--surprised the hell outta me]. All entries had to begin with "If only I hadn't"
If only I hadn’t been looking for sea glass that Thursday on that beach, I wouldn’t have spotted what looked like a discolored tongue. The beach was Pete’s Beach and for a Thursday the weather was Sunday good—maybe better. Not an ominous crow in the sky or a gull in sight as I walked where the tide’s foam lip had just slipped back from licking forward, where the sand was tight and wet. Even though it’s a walk out of distant memory, nearly a quarter century back, I still see the occasional small barnacled crab scrabbling across my path from one trail of seaweed to a stone or another clump of wrinkled, leathery flags. The beach was littered with many such clumps, a few broken shells, a fair amount of scattered small stones—but no sea glass, or so it had seemed.
Then one of those crabs, hardly the size of a quarter, bits of red showing through the craterlike growths on its shell, darted diagonally across the sand. The sideways scrabble took the crab over the tongue-shaped rock, directing my search for sea glass right to it, the same way that old bouncing ball in Mitch Miller’s Sing-Along Hours moved the eyes of viewer’s right along to
the next word of the song. The crab jittered its sideways scurry straight to the gray-mottled-with-red, or red-mottled-with-gray surface of the beach debris. It was shiny somehow, and frosty dull at the same time, and had that peculiar shape that reminded me of a tongue. I had no choice but to pick it up.
But the
it I picked up wasn’t sea glass anymore than it was stone. The
it I picked up was a tongue. An odd wedge of discoloration and deflated bloat that once was muscle and now was a grotesque, hardening mush. Why it glistened in the Thursday sun like reddish sea glass—I do not know. I can barely record these words.
That Thursday that seemed
Sunday good, that day when I put the tongue back on the tight, wet sand—has never let me go. I was a programmer then and the walk on Pete’s Beach was a walk to free up the angst of numbers scurrying like crabs from one formulation to the next inside my weedy thinking. I worked for a multi-national company with thousands, not hundreds, but thousands of other employees waiting for the tricks that would make their workdays possible. Won’t even mention those employees’ end clients and what might or might not result from some glitch I made, if my numbers were wrong—my programming numbers. This was not a good time for a tongue turned or turning to mush in my hand on a beach in southern California. I was from Des Moines. Sea glass would’ve been magical to take home—but not a decomposing human tongue. I put the tongue back where I’d found it. The crab was gone. And then I was gone, too.
I was gone from that beach on that day. I was back with my programming numbers. I was back in Des Moines by week’s end. The crows are plentiful in Des Moines, and busy--always communicating what I had done on Pete’s Beach. The sky was full of what I’d done, or failed to do. The sky was the only witness other than the small quarter-sized crab. Sometimes the little crab is there in my dreams to be plucked, time and again, by the crows and swallowed down in a gulp. But he comes back like that god, Prometheus—the one who stole fire to give it to man and got chained by Zeus to a rock somewhere for a bird to pick out his gut. He comes back like Dionysus. And like Jesus.
If only I hadn’t been looking for sea glass, I might have a chance at redemption. I might've had a shot at resurrection, too.
(Read 928 times)
[1] 