Seaside Sketches

Some cute sketches written last summer, feedback welcome I was trying new stuff out.

I

A father and daughter and bulldog are walking along the seawall. She’s singing up new games while her father walks behind her and the bulldog plods behind him. She’s telling him, arms stretched out on both sides, You have to jump over the cracks! as she takes a long step, a short hop, over one of the cracks in the seawall which is slipping every year bit by bit into the ocean. She’s saying, Watch me dad! He checks on the bulldog waddling behind him by his ankles. She’s wearing a pink bicycle helmet. It’s fifteen feet to the boulders of the coast below, all screwed up by blizzards into jagged peaks like black teeth. Her helmet would be no help. No, it’s a uniform. Her uniform is her little white shirt which was bought soft but turned embracingly rough by a summer of sun and Atlantic salt and sand and scuffs on the concrete playing basketball with younger brothers, teaching them how to ride their bikes. Her pink helmet is her three pointed hat, her feather in it is her black hair bleached brown by the sea. She points to cargo containers piled against the wall and shouts, That way! and her father glances between her and the sunset’s orange red purple afterglow, while the bulldog bobs behind them watching their ankles dance wondering, Where will she go next?

II

Out for a walk with the dog in the night air, she sniffs at the ground. There are little black bugs, round bodied bumbling, in the cool nightgrass. They buoy about her black nose—what a great black bug that is!—and swim about the stream of its hot humid exhale, its quick sharp inhale and, Thwump! One is pulled in, into the blackest of damp darks, the darkest of damp blacks, snatched out of the good clean night!; and just as quickly, with a shake, Thpa! They’re whirling, spinning through the air, little wings and spindle legs spread wide to the streaming moonlight, until, Thud! (barely a thd to the offended dog above) They bounce, crash through wide green clipped crabgrass into sandy shadowed dirt, sending bits of quartz dust shimmering in the breeze, sending a tiny translucent white mite scurrying scared on its belly under a pebble. Above, the stars shimmer through sparse seaside fog like fireflies, horizonbound city lights, and one goes falling, plunging with a white stream into the blueblack ocean sky.  

III

Baby boy on the ferry wearing red hat with smiling whale on it, barely fitting his head, barely, blond curls almost white poking out under the too big brim over his baby blue eyes looking up at his grandma with a question, a question! If only she’d stop talking. Cheeks flush in the summer heat, he's out of breath, holding back the question at the edge of his mouth hung open in the anxiety of the single moment of silence in which his question will fit: Arethereanywhaleshere? 

IV

On the bay beach between the coast guard station and the old dock where red tug boats go out to greet the green and blue stacked cargo ships. The sand is wet with rain and the receding tide’s foam. And there are dead rabbits lying scattered like beached jellyfish after a storm on the sand. Washed ashore from some foreclosed island or killed in the night, last night, by heavy air condensed on the cold water rolling to shore, as the rabbits sat back watching the stars meet the horizon with black eyes through the incoming night’s mist. In the morning they lay wide eyed and sodden on wreaths of rust red seaweed, fur gray like the sand, tiny dunes rolling up snug by their bellies. But they don’t stink like death, kissed clean by pure salt water, they’re left smelling like humus and storms.

V

Seagulls: shitting on my deck

I: shooting them with a gun