Status: Re-uploaded 1/12/2012
Salt
Toss
The following day, Victoria had read a book on the beach, while Christian hunted for unusual shells for her collection. Sand crept into the crack between her pages when she kept turning around, because he had reappeared with fresh gifts and caught her by surprise.
Later in the afternoon, they bought oysters and chips from the shop, which had a raised deck and could be visited barefoot, and walked back to the ocean to eat them on their towels. Seagulls crowded around them, crowing for scraps, and occasionally making adventurous dives when hands lingered too long between chip boxes and mouths. By the time they had done eating and fighting off the birds, their legs, arms and sides were plastered with sand, and their towels were as dirty as the beach itself.
The day after that, they had gone on a long trek around the headland, balancing on precarious ledges and investigating rock pools. They had both been very badly sunburned. While Victoria kneeled down to better inspect a tiny mirror world, Christian loped away to where the sea was thrashing against a raised cliff shaped like a boat’s prow, hissing violently down crevices and spouting jets of white water through a series of blowholes.
He stood dangerously close to the edge, apparently looking for something. He could easily have been licked clean off the shelf by an errant wave, or the sudden surging of a tide so swollen that it carried entire uprooted kelp plants inside its sapphire depths, like fossils trapped in amber. Nevertheless, Victoria had to call him back four times before he heard her.
On the fourth day, Christian slept in, claiming he was still too sore to go outdoors and risk getting burned again. He complained when Victoria rubbed lotion onto his lobster-red back, which she supposed was only natural. It must have hurt. They had watched TV throughout most of the day, and in the evening, she got a call from Darcy. She talked on the phone in the sun room while Christian moped around, rearranging cushions and lamenting his inability to decide on a wicker chair.
On the fifth day, Victoria spent nearly an hour in the bath before he was awake. The water was cool by the time she was done thinking and toying with some of the shells that were his trophies. She turned them over and over in her hands, admiring the colours in their whorls and slowly rinsing out the fine sand tucked inside them. She clambered out of the bath into a dry towel, and woke him forcefully.
They had never spent more time together in their lives, but she still got the feeling, as she stared out of the wide window in the sun room for the hundredth time, that they were spending most of it apart.
She couldn’t help thinking that they were like the twin swirls in some of the shells now scattered throughout the house- travelling the same path together, but forever held parallel, never quite touching.
They looped through five days, then six, then seven, doing laps of a circuit that would never end, unless it broke.
Later in the afternoon, they bought oysters and chips from the shop, which had a raised deck and could be visited barefoot, and walked back to the ocean to eat them on their towels. Seagulls crowded around them, crowing for scraps, and occasionally making adventurous dives when hands lingered too long between chip boxes and mouths. By the time they had done eating and fighting off the birds, their legs, arms and sides were plastered with sand, and their towels were as dirty as the beach itself.
The day after that, they had gone on a long trek around the headland, balancing on precarious ledges and investigating rock pools. They had both been very badly sunburned. While Victoria kneeled down to better inspect a tiny mirror world, Christian loped away to where the sea was thrashing against a raised cliff shaped like a boat’s prow, hissing violently down crevices and spouting jets of white water through a series of blowholes.
He stood dangerously close to the edge, apparently looking for something. He could easily have been licked clean off the shelf by an errant wave, or the sudden surging of a tide so swollen that it carried entire uprooted kelp plants inside its sapphire depths, like fossils trapped in amber. Nevertheless, Victoria had to call him back four times before he heard her.
On the fourth day, Christian slept in, claiming he was still too sore to go outdoors and risk getting burned again. He complained when Victoria rubbed lotion onto his lobster-red back, which she supposed was only natural. It must have hurt. They had watched TV throughout most of the day, and in the evening, she got a call from Darcy. She talked on the phone in the sun room while Christian moped around, rearranging cushions and lamenting his inability to decide on a wicker chair.
On the fifth day, Victoria spent nearly an hour in the bath before he was awake. The water was cool by the time she was done thinking and toying with some of the shells that were his trophies. She turned them over and over in her hands, admiring the colours in their whorls and slowly rinsing out the fine sand tucked inside them. She clambered out of the bath into a dry towel, and woke him forcefully.
They had never spent more time together in their lives, but she still got the feeling, as she stared out of the wide window in the sun room for the hundredth time, that they were spending most of it apart.
She couldn’t help thinking that they were like the twin swirls in some of the shells now scattered throughout the house- travelling the same path together, but forever held parallel, never quite touching.
They looped through five days, then six, then seven, doing laps of a circuit that would never end, unless it broke.