Pall Of Smoke
Pale
dawning. She was alone on the beach with wisps of ground fog trailing
the shuffle of her bare feet. The soft break of the low swell was
glassy in the dead calm. Down the beach, a pall of smoke squatted
above the laurel hedge, rising slowly above where the house once
stood. Now charred timbers. One red truck remained; the crew of three
probing debris and spraying hot spots. The pudgy neighbor stood
gaping from his driveway.
"Not
there, you say?" he said.
"That's
right."
"But
... she's always there."
"What
you see is what you get," the fireman said.
"But
... "
She
had walked to the point in the darkness of early morning wearing just
her gray night gown. Tide in, she thought, the rock pools all
covered. Flood. Then ebb. The coarse sand of the upper beach,
littered with pebbled stone from the cliff's wall, pricked and pained
her tender feet; and she stopped, standing with a hand against the
rough wall of rock. She stood quite composed looking out to sea, a
smudge on her cheek.
With
looping swirls of foamy sea water lapping her feet, she had turned
and retraced her steps, the fire's glow in the distance, a siren's
wail. At the little creek, she walked across the swale of drifted
sand to sit in a hollow in the lee of driftwood and flotsam, the
detritus of gales past. She sat on a log and remembered that she had
not looked up the bird---a tern, was it? Smaller than a gull--- and
then said, "My glasses."
Swirls
of fog, a bit of breeze rising. She ran a hand through tangled, lank
hair. Tendrils, she thought. Fragments ... vacant thoughts ...
Hunched,
her body now slack, leaning against the shabby, rumpled bed, in the
distance the whaler's stench coming down the breeze, a gull dancing
the tide, turning now, sudden rush of water hissing up the sand, a
horn sounding, yelling in the street, crow caws, and down the beach,
the child calling
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