Tales of the Beachcomber
Story - Mark Toner, Art Mark Toner and Tsu
Six
Hannah Lackoff
Art: Wallace West
Sun up on the island. He sees her down by the water, all silhouette, skinny new legs and arms she will grow into. She doesn’t know he is watching. She doesn’t even know he exists, and that is how it should be.
He goes inside and makes himself a cup of tea. From the window above the sink he can still see her, and she still cannot see him. As it steeps, black with lemongrass, he thinks, as he does every morning, about this ritual. He doesn’t even like lemongrass. But she did, and the aroma reminds him of her. The taste is bitter on his tongue.
There’s a lovely chill in the air and the porcelain warms his palms. He stirs honey into the cup and watches her from the veranda, stepping in and out of the waves, testing her balance on first one foot and then the other. Only a few more days now, maybe a week.
In the basement, the boy waits. He doesn’t know he is a boy yet; he doesn’t know anything but his salty chemical bath and the ripple of his hair in the current. Boys take longer than girls, but they come out larger and more fully formed. He won’t need the time on the beach that she does. His legs won’t need the practice.
His fingertips tingle. Somewhere inside his lizard brain, he remembers the feel of her skin. Elastic, then dough, then paper, then dust. Again and again and again.
Jude I:
Grade school. He drew her comics in art class, and in other classes too. He got in trouble for that, but just a little. It made her smile. It was worth it.
In sixth grade he moved, but in ninth there she was again in his neighborhood, for just a few months, just for summer camp, and then it turned out that her uncle lived a few houses down, so he saw her sometimes.
College: he forgot about her, mostly, in the haze of studying science and art and other girls. Once he was home for Christmas and went to the bar with Thom Waterson and he saw her through a beery visage, sitting with her uncle and two cousins, dressed like a Christmas cracker and probably not as drunk as he. He told Thom Waterson he thought she was beautiful, but Thom died in a car crash that New Year’s Eve.
First jobs, a handful of moves, a flicker of girlfriends, but he would see her on the subway, on the street, on television infomercials where he knew she couldn’t be. And then one day he opened his door to find her unlocking the apartment across from his, like she was fated to be there, like he had just been waiting all this time to come home.
Jude II:
On the beach, a chance encounter. A girl, pretty but coltish, not yet fully grown. She was familiar. He thought maybe he knew her, slightly, a family friend.
Later he couldn’t stop thinking about her. She was all angles; triangle nose, kited elbows, boxy knees. Teeth too large, but still alluring. They glowed in his mind like candy.
The beach, again, but later still, he could not say how much. She looked older, softer, the lines of her body blurred into something wet and mammalian. They spoke, sentences light as eiderdown, void of substance but full of warmth.
And later, sunset, night, sunrise, days and weeks and months and years, the heat of his body twinned with hers, all mouth and hand and skin and hair.
Jude III:
Hello.
Hello.
Do you live nearby?
I do, but-
It’s just, you look a little lost.
Do I?
You’re just standing there, staring.
My apologies, you just look so familiar-
Do I?
You do.
That’s funny.
Is it?
No, I mean, I was just thinking the same thing. Have we met?
Just now.
I’m Isla.
