BY Ben Gibbons
Here we come twirling and flailing and slouching like a windup toy circus troupe down
the blank expanse of the lakeshore in the early morning. The merging of water and sky, resting in
the same shade of gray-blue pastel, negates the horizon. The serene absence of our surroundings
has scrubbed the tickmarks of age and chronology from our bodies, picked our synapses clean
like a gull keening over one of the fish carcasses that litter the beach.
The lumbering Hoag, head as bald as a newborn baby’s, spins with a log of driftwood
clutched at the end of his outstretched arms, allowing its heft to pull him faster and faster around
until he lets go and sends it whirling into a bank of hardpacked sand. Hoag loves black cats and
rugby and cried whenever he heard someone sing “Mrs. Robinson” and bought a bottle of vodka
for a kid who killed someone in a car crash and ran an overpriced lemonade stand and sent golf
balls flying over the highway behind his house and can’t cry anymore and got hooked on pills for
a while and switched them out for pot and lives happily in a van. Now he’s using the same log to
hammer a smaller piece of wood into a loose patch of sand.
The white-capped gray waves that lap the shoreline find themselves doubled in frozen
parallel by the deposits that form our path along the beach. Of the unwanted debris that the
waves push from the lake, the dark pebbles are the heaviest, and come to rest in a thick band
close to the water’s edge. The delicate white shells are lighter, and travel further onto shore
before settling into a thin stripe that looks like an endless squeeze of toothpaste.
Aletta and Ilena—siblings, I think—stare at the ground through aquamarine eyes
obscured by veils of sandy hair as they shuffle along in search of igneous rocks and colorful
pieces of beach glass. They’d look depressed in a different context. Every few steps, they bend
down, scoop a limb, and straighten back up, like the pieces of construction equipment pluming
smoke beyond the ridge that guards the beach. Aletta has a sleeve of tattoos running down her
right arm and tends a fern garden and can point out different species of flowers in the
diminishing forest and was pulled into a shadowy bedroom by her uncle and made up a game
with a volleyball and a wiffle bat and threw up on a roller coaster after eating too much cotton
candy and doesn’t feel safe in her own mind and helps Ilena take care of the pets. Ilena has one
side of her head shaved and creates collages from beach glass and hasn’t talked to her parents
since she came out as gay and tamed a fly by putting it in the freezer with a string looped around
its body and peed on Aletta’s stuffed animals and didn’t talk for years and has a brain that
prevents her from living on her own. Ilena mutters something to Aletta, who laughs into a baggy
sleeve.
A breeze blows through, whipping us with the briny stench of fish and algae.
Eban stops often to skip flat stones across the surface of the lake. He twists his arm
behind him and brings it around in a wrenching sidearm motion, sending his projectile skimming
from the shoreline. Eban likes the feeling of ski caps against his ears and plays the drums and has
a scar on his knee from falling in a bamboo forest and left his fiancé one day without a word and
drew imaginary animals in a sketchbook and hid from bullies and had his mind warped from an
ecstasy trip and tries his best. Each kiss of rock on water leaves behind a vibratory lily-pad that
grows larger and less distinct with each passing second.
I walk with my hands in my pockets and look out at the lake. I always feel like I’m at the
edge of something, a sensation that nags and haunts me when I’m inland, surrounded by spires of
concrete and metal and pixel, but soothes me now, at the dividing point between land and water.
The breeze picks up, stinging our faces with spray.
Still we come twirling and flailing and slouching like a windup toy circus troupe down
the lakeshore in the lengthening morning. We’re not children and we’re not adults; we’re just
here on the blank expanse of the beach skipping rocks and throwing logs and staring at the
ground like we’re sad and allowing the gray water and sky to gradually erase the things that have
been etched inside us.
Then our pockets vibrate simultaneously, and we stop our motions to reach in and pull
out our phones. The message that flashes across each of our screens is the same, and indicates
that it’s time to put down our stones and our sticks and walk away from the water, over the ridge,
toward the distant smoke and the subliminal whir of machinery. Hoag drops his log. He’s a
Customer Care Liaison. Ilena and Aletta stand fully upright. They’re Workplace Coordination
Specialists. I’m a Project Facilitation Manager. As the four of us divert our strides away from the
stone and shell path that runs along the water, Eban keeps staring at his screen. Then he swings
his arm behind him and whips it back around with a torquing motion of his wrist, sending the
phone bouncing across the surface of the water. It’s his best skip yet, and the phone just keeps
gliding on toward the invisible horizon. Eban too leaves the stone and shell path, but walks in the
opposite direction from the ridge, into the lake, his receding figure bisecting the widening circles
left in the phone’s wake. None of us try to stop him.
Ben Gibbons is a Pittsburgh-based writer; his blog, Bored In Pittsburgh, covers the local music community, and his fiction has been published in Tupelo Quarterly, the Dark Mountain Project, and Pinky Thinker Press, with a short story forthcoming in Allium.