The Ocean Raged, Surging for Miles
By Tommy Dean
He watched her toes wiggle in the sizzling surf, the sound like distant fires, warning them of the flames to come. The sun a lemon drop in a static sky. Beautiful to most, but his mind leapt at dystopias, the way the world would end, whether he’d suffer in its demise. She, his Callie, wanted to get married, said that ten years was long enough to wait, to wonder, to fuck around. She complained of sagging, of the extra inches around her waist, but he loved the soft, honey-pot of her stomach, the way her skin bronzed in the sun, the way she looked at him when they kissed. There were more things he’d love to say about her body, but he doesn’t want to embarrass her, his desires a merri-go-round, he had trouble slowing, once it got going. The problem was that he wanted her too much.
The waters were already too warm to ignore. The shores reclaimed in feet. Daily mask-wearing recommended for the most vulnerable.
They had ignored the warnings. They’d been living on borrowed time their whole lives. The roads were cracked and half sand-duned, but passable. The hotels were shuttered, but unsurveilled, and easy to enter if you knew how to jimmy a door.
The wind picked up as the sun dropped into the sea, dissolving into a rainbow of melted crayons. They were waiting for darkness, for the ghost crabs to emerge from their buried holes, to slink across the cooling sand, hunting.
He wouldn’t propose. Didn’t even have a ring, and he wasn’t sure they even had enough cash to book a sleeping lane in the overcrowded rest stops on the drive back to Indiana. The center of the country still lived through a hapdash commerce. There was still the rent on their trailer and the Friday night drinks that kept them feeling alive, full of something other than debt. Potential. For a life they often dreamt about, out loud, before falling asleep, the room sweltering, sweating together.
She tried to catch his eye, the shadow more pronounced in the welcoming darkness, holding his hand, walking near the water on the hardpacked sand. He held out his phone, the flash light app on, but weakly illuminating the trash bobbing in the surf. Against the settling skies, the ocean raged, surging for miles. Further up the beach, screams, and flashing, scattered beams of stronger lights. They were always too far away from the action, able only to observe the rest of the world, people actually happy, not just pretending.
To their right, a blitz of translucent movement, the whisper of small legs across sand. He let go of her hand, pounced, his phone dropped. The crab, skeletal, twisting in his palm, as he lurched onto one knee, holding up the animal for Callie to see. “Brandon, I can’t find the phone.”
“You’re missing it,” he said. A mixing of the crab’s desire to live, to escape, his own pulse a threaded knot of worry she had stopped listening to. This trip her idea of fun. See the world end at its edges. Frolic in the near-danger.
A pinch, sharp and swift, and the crab fell from his hand. She untangled the phone from a skein of seaweed, wiping it on her glistening calf. The photo will show a sluice of bright red blood bubbled in the wedge between thumb and finger, his face a rictus of pain, the surprise of the flash.
After the photo, in time with memory, he’ll remember the soft touch of her hands, the hotness of her mouth sucking away the blood, the years they’ll have left as the world continued to rot. How they stayed together anyway.
Tommy Dean is the author of two flash fiction chapbooks and a full flash collection, Hollows (Alternating Current Press 2022). He is the Editor of Fractured Lit and Uncharted Magazine. His writing can be found in Best Microfiction 2019, 2020, 2023, Best Small Fictions 2019 and 2022, Harpur Palate, and elsewhere. Find him at tommydeanwriter.com and on Twitter @TommyDeanWriter.