Auntie’s Beach
The beach was a long,
snake-like strip of sand leading up to two sandcastle thrones perched atop a little pyramid
of jagged rock.
The tide was coming in.
–But this is not the sea, Auntie, He say.
He is bent over in the surf.
She is bent over
as well.
Beside them, a dripping wet notebook of scrawled chicken-scratches
plays lazily in the gentle tide.
The pages are still barely readable, if he could make out her handwriting.
Sand is sticking on the
pages
She is bent over, hunched, in a miserable position.
Defeated,
like a depressed monkey.
–I once saw a monkey eat a piece of rotten fruit to get drunk, he say. He say this as if it is the most fascinating fact in all the world. I think he saw it on National Geographic.
She looks at him miserably.
–You probably just dreamed that, she says. She is still squatting in the sand and foam.
–No. But I’ll tell you what I did dream last night.
She looks at him
with those miserable, bleary red eyes.
Her hair is a limp, wet, frazzled mess.
She says,
–And what did you dream last night, Null?
She says this as if she couldn’t care less.
He spy the mysterious,
spiral bound notebook a few feet away, where it is gradually becoming more and more soggy and ruined by the salt sea.
The steady churning slop of the incoming tide lulls me into a semi-trance.
–Last night I impersonated Hitler.
She stares blankly, uncomprehending.
–Of course, I had on a stiff grey Nazi jacket with a swastika armband, and I had a cartoon approximation of Hitler’s face and famous limp forelock. The dream began in the middle of events, I think.
–I was delivering a speech when, suddenly, an assassin stands up in the crowd, points a Walther P.38 at me, and fires…or maybe it was a row of assassins. I can’t remember. At any rate, I can still see the determined, square-jawed visage of the lead assassin, his hair combed over into his eyes. I tell you: it could have been a young Hitler.
–But I was hit. But not killed. Next I know, I am recuperating in a schoolroom restroom, a big place. But the stall I’m stuck in doesn’t seem to have a door. So here I am, sitting with my pants down around my ankles, and I’m sure I’ve shit myself from being shot, and I’m bleeding still, minimally.
–And this row of horrid teenage girls comes rushing in in a line, and right away I make they are trying not to look at my bloody, shitty nakedness, and they are retrieving book bags or packs from a big pile in a corner of the lavatory. I am still dressed as Hitler, and the whole situation just seemed monstrous.
–So I must have beat a retreat from a lavatory to a dormitory room. I am talking to two Jewish boys about Hell. I seem as if I don’t believe in Hell. I ask, So where is this Hell you speak of?
–One of the boys seems shy and withdrawn. The other is a chubby fellow in a white T-shirt and a sock cap. He has a dark complexion and wide, laughing eyes.
–I ask him if only Jews go to heaven.
–He affirms this for me.
–So I stumble out, shot. I’m still dressed as Hitler apparently, still bleeding, although why I haven’t bled to death yet I its own private mystery.
–So this monster truck that looks like a UPS truck crossed with a house on wheels comes pulling up.
My mother is behind the wheel. She looks a lot younger. Hitler’s mother was young when she died.
And inside it is huge, and gunmetal grey floors.
Looks like a giant storehouse.
–And I tell her all about being Hitler. Got me shot. I’m bleeding all over these floors.
***
He looks up from his reverie.
Up the beach,
he can see his grandparents
seated imperiously on thrones made like sandcastles.
They are either asleep,
petrified into suspended animation, or dead.
But their expressions seem frozen in time.
He looks back at his aunt.
She is still crouched in the surf.
Beyond, he can see the sun darken behind little
grey and white veil of cloud, revealing its face only momentarily to paint with bright yellow illumination the seashore world.
Below,
that damnable soggy notebook
clotted with sand, soaked through until the scrawled loops of ink were blotted into nonsense,
(–-It had something to do with a bundle of sticks.)
He didn’t know what she was talking about; she looked as if she was recovering from some sort of mental fugue state. Or maybe just coming down off of really good drugs.
She ran her fingers through her stringy, dirty bangs. Overhead, lonely gulls cast shadows on the ground below.
***
Later
he walked up the beach,
Kicking driftwood as he went. His sneakers were clotted with sand; his nose was stinging with the rasp of sea salt. He had sweated a bit, but felt surprisingly cool as the gentle breeze wafted in off the water.
Ahead, he saw the strange, statuesque figures of his maybe dead grandparents seated in their sandcastle thrones.
–It’s a lesson of some sort. Something about
time?
He wasn’t sure. Seagulls cawed; the tide rumbled less and less gently. Sandcastles eroded in the salty air.
It was all a moment.
Hopefully, my various musics are ultimately like magic bullets that enter and impact at the base of the skull, ricochet
around the brain chamber, and then leave a gaping exit wound in the forehead. You may hate them
Since 2006!
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