All the Other Places ... continued

When he finished the tea he went outside to smoke, a habit he preferred and practiced at night. The air was muggy, despite the wind and approaching storm. He sat down and leaned back against the screen door and smoked. Insects whirled noisily in front of his face and around the glowing ash. He propped up his legs and flicked his finger at the crickets, June bugs, and mosquitoes that landed on his arms and legs. He listened to the frogs as they called back and forth to each other. There were two colonies of frogs living on opposite sides of his yard. He heard them almost every night. Every now and then one of them would stray and causally hop onto the porch. The frog and man would stare at each other, but eventually the frog grew bored of the man and returned to his own kind.

The wind, sudden, rushed across the porch and through the trees, causing pine cones and needles to fall like rain over the yard. He could hear the branches of the trees that grew next to the house scraping back and forth against the galvanized roof. He held the cigarette down at his side and tilted back his head. He could almost smell the ocean.

Then, shutting his eyes, he began to see how things had been. The ocean and brown sand, the sunburnt body of the young man that had been himself, barely twenty, not even eight years ago, diving at just the right moment into the surging waves and then feeling the sudden rush of cool water. The wide, deep ocean. Milky green near the shore and blue against the cloudless horizon. The questions: Could you swim that far out? Could you reach the blue water?

© 2000 Trout &
Will Fox