Onyx Egg

This may or may not become a story at some point. If it does, I'm not sure whether I'll try and couch it in messed-up realism or something a little more fantastical. More likely I will steal the male character from this and use him in something else, as I've got some ideas for him. As it stands it works alright as a few joined scenes, I think. Lots of subtext and sub-subtext.

I've also noticed that until I commit to writing a full-fledged story I'm very hesitant to give names to characters. You can see the same thing back in "A Small Part of the Pantomime." Interesting.

- - -          

The door creaks when it opens. She greets the cold with a salesman's smile and hides the gesture of tightening her coat about her from no one in particular. Over the hill's edge, she can see a balloon rising toward some infinite point where she supposes the future soars, too, like an onyx egg clutched in the talons of a vulture.

            In her dreams she has heard a hand snapping its fingers and seen the earth rend like books opening. Sometimes it tries to snap near water but no noise comes, and the seas roil on. The hand in her dreams is afraid of water, so she is going to the beach. Around her shoulder there is a black bag, and inside the bag she has packed sunscreen and a towel, and a red scarf.

            The shore in the late afternoon is bone white, pearl white. Far from where the tide bruises the sand to a dark brown, she sits on the towel and pulls off her shoes. She imagines enormous crabs spinning in the ground beneath her, shaping cyclones to funnel her toes to the spaces between their pincers, and keeps her feet on the rough fabric.

            It is late October on a Wednesday and she has the beach to herself until the small figure of a man grows up the shore. He wears shorts and a green shirt styled with the image of a cannon, its barrel pointing toward his groin, and carries a stuffed dog blue-black like frostbite under his arm. At first it seems he will pass her without comment, but three feet past the western edge of her towel he turns and says to her, I won this at the carnival.

            She says, So? And then: Hello. She feels nervous and lets her face garble the emotion to scorn. The water pulls in and out and sounds like static.

            Do you want it?

            No.

            His pale lips part slightly and hang there. I won this at the carnival, he repeats. His bare calves make her shiver. You can't take it from me.

            I don't want to.

            He scoffs, and keeps walking. She fixates on his ankles and takes out her scarf, and around her neck it feels like a rush of cold blood, a lizard's womb. A breeze ices her bones and she watches the ocean's noises simmer off the water. Her scarf dances and lays down. What color is the scarf of the woman?

            When the woman is another grain of sand muddying the horizon he sits with his legs crossed and sets down the stuffed dog. A shine catches its cold dark eye.

            The theory of relativity describes gravity as distortions in a long black sheet of astronomy, of the muck that is empty space. Planets and stars crater the muck, and we slide down the curves of their depressions, and they hold us at the bottom. From beneath, the man supposes, these pits must look like bulges, like black casts of marbles. He wonders if a person might be able to see the light from skyscraper windows through the wall of one of these wells. Because this is what the shine on the cold dark dog's eye looks like: the light from a skyscraper window glowing through a bubble of gravity caught under the void of an empty night sky.

            He is hot—desperately hot—like he can feel the eternity of stars boiling through the eye of the dog, and as the beach dims under thickening clouds he strips the shirt from him and walks forward, and lets the waves fold him into the ocean.

            She stands under the shower head and scrapes sand from her ankles. The grains burn against her and she imagines a prickling against the soles of her feet, that in the hot water they have melted and frozen to glass, so that her blood clots in the drain.

            In her room she turns on a small television with a remote control sitting on her dresser. The TV is mounted on her wall like the head of a dead animal. There is a dead animal on TV: a man. The news frames his body with stock statistics on futuristic blue and thunderstorm warnings on outdated red. His body is pale, so that from top to bottom, the screen shows three colors that hold a great deal of meaning for many people: Red, white, and blue.