Kissing its salty bonnet,
Ever so gingerly,
Before ricocheting from spot to spot.
A frog jumping lily pads,
As we counted; one, two, three…
Eight! I got eight!
You did not!
I did so!
Then falling victim,
To the inevitable forces,
Of gravitational pull.
Plummeting to the,
Depths below,
With slim chance to ever ride again.
Steered by the whimsical tides and
Fickle currents of nature.
Sentenced to spend forever inhabiting the,
Sandy bottom of the harbor dubbed Phinney’s.
Or perhaps, farther, carried with current to the ocean proper.
Its edges wearing and weakening,
Day by day,
Year by year,
Decade by decade,
Weathered and battered and broken,
By age,
Just. Like. Us.
Chapter 40
Corpse
Later on, just as we rounded the island’s bend where the rental cottages merged with Captains Row, exclusive owners, and started scurrying over the first of a series of uniformly aligned stone jetties extending their reach toward the turbulent ocean. The stones kept watch like a platoon of crusty old soldiers, long forgotten, but still holding the fort on the island’s north side, battling for centuries against its fierce, salty nemesis, and slowly losing the fight. One formation in particular shaped into a small cave.
When, suddenly,
We saw something unnerving.
Well, Stick saw it first. Because he was so friggin’ tall.
But then we saw it. If, in fact, it was an IT.
There was something way out on the ragged beach near the large boulders. Something wedged. Looked like a bundle of clothes or maybe a boat’s trampoline or something wearing clothes? Or, gulp, someone? Ok, this was weird. Whatever it was, the large form was sticking out from between the last few boulders at the very end of the slightly exposed jetty.
Was this some kind of a joke? Was that a mannequin or something? Wait, or was that a person?
We all looked at each other with the same gruesome suspicion. This part of the jetty was normally well camouflaged and hidden underwater, but it did become visible during lunar low tides, and yes, it did look like a person!
There was only one way to find out. We all hustled out there, quickly maneuvering over the snail-encrusted rocks which were slippery, with a slimy layer of salt and seaweed serving as nature’s slip-n-slide, at least for the novice mountaineer.
We quickly, and I will warn, quite graphically, confirmed our original supposition.
It was a person. A man.
Unfortunately, a very dead one.
