She took her hair down and kept walking towards the cliff. The pine needles felt soft in the dirt beneath her bare feet. The tree trunks were black against a blinding white-blue ocean. They looked like vertical black bars, like the bars of a cell. The bars widened and thinned out as she walked forward calmly. Her black cotton dress was striped in white.
The softness underfoot thinned and hardened as her path sloped upward. She left the trees behind and walked out onto the ridge, and was suddenly in the light and wind. She stood on worn, dark rock flecked with green and white mosses and lichens. The expression on her face became stupid as she looked out over the water.
The horizon was a knife against the sky. The sun held the entire ocean in writhing flame. There were no waves, only a vast sea of white, shifting, fiery tongues. The foam and spray were sparks and white smoke, drifting in a wind that was absolutely steady with no variation in force or direction. She breathed in and looked out. Her dazzled eyes could not adjust, so her mind went out and met the light on its own terms. Within a minute or two, there was no longer a single thought in her head. Her head was the ocean. The cliff and the trees had dropped away. The sun was nowhere. The sun was the surface of the sea.
Her reverie broke as a bird drifted across her mind's eye, slid backwards by the wind across the dull blue cloudless curtain of sky. As she watched the bird, a burning thought grew in her mind until she could think of nothing else. She felt certain she and the bird had locked eyes, and that the bird had put the thought there - though at such a distance, it was impossible to really see the bird's eye, not with the glare of the ocean washing out such dark details.
The thought held her in a tightening grip that was swiftly escalating to panic. To break the spell, she voiced the thought out loud, loud, calling it out into the wind, singing it out over the crashing of the surf against the rocks far below: "What" she cried, "will this week's installment of Fiction Friday be about, right here on Consider Your Ass Kicked!?"
No reply came. The bird turned, caught the wind and sped off with it.
6 comments:
I bet it is the same god-damn bird from 'til death do us.
The 'til death do us bird? No, that dude was one of those little sweet cheep cheepers. This bird here is no way nimble enough to zap out of the way of an oncoming car. He's a big wind-hanging sea kite with a fish-scooper of a bill.
But perhaps the two birds are of one mind, in their bird way?
In any case, both scenes definitely do take place along the same stretch of coast.
To clarify: the stretch of coast a trip and fall West of California's Highway 1 South, or more properly/specifically: Highway 1, south of Monterey, somewhere north of San Simeon.
Uncanny. I was just looking at a map of this area yesterday. I was speaking to a client originally from somewhere called Santa Clarita so I had to look it up to get an idea of where it was.
I love the word "uncanny"; but then you knew that about me.
I cannot bear to enclose a semicolon within quotation marks, as one does a comma. I suspect you didn't know that about me.
If you ever get out round this neck of the world again sometime, Mel, I'll have to take you down that particular nape of it. There's parts there that simply don't fit on maps.
I didn't know that about your fondness for "uncanny" - but know I do! and uncannily I use it a fair bit as well, but more so verbally I think.
And that nape escape sounds like a plan. Count me in.
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