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Solitude
- for lizi, birthday wishes and inspiration aside -
The gentle roar of the clean beach echoed up the wooden deck, overlooking the water, on the cliff.
The cliff itself reached high into the horizon, the sea scrambling at its imposing heels, threatening to swallow it up, but never quite finding the sanctimonious strength to topple it, and the wooden house at its peak.
It wasn't quiet here: seagulls screeched at each other; the surf crashed noisily into the shoreline, retreating with a moan , attacking the rocks again, wearing away its defences.
The sliver of beach however was devoid of the footprints of children, the waves absent of strong swimmers, the sand free from lazy sunbakers eager to soak up the warm sun: the cycloptic eye burning down in the late summer air.
Rocks hiding just below the surface were a firm deterrent against boating of any kind, strong rips mocked at even the strongest swimmer.
The ocean throws itself onto the rocks with fierce purpose, hurling curses that only the wind and a glass-eyed figure can hear.
Seagulls hover on strings in the air, pausing, before diving again for fish in the waves.
A figure stood, quite alone, as the sun beat down. Standing several paces away from the cliffs edge, another several paces away from the falling-apart edge of the porch, it seemed to sway like a tree frame in the stern ocean wind. The wind itself tore at the figure, flung the water like a play-thing, no serious intent to keep it in all one spot, or in fact, as all.
He was too thin the be called slender, too bony to be called smooth, too many edges to be called gentle, too thin to be called graceful, too angled to be called pretty, too bronzed to be called fair, too pale to be called night-times ghost. He was too raged in body to be elegant or aristocratic, his hair in a frenzied dance.
He was alone, just paces away from oblivion, just paces away from deafening silence.
No one ever came here: no footsteps or familiar voices or pleasant remarks -- and even if they did come, their eyes would simple slide from the cliff edge, to the forest, dark and forbidding, crawling away from it.
None could see a house.
None could see a man.
None would see...
Food arrives regularly, brought once a week by a blonde man on a flying carpet. Newspapers and letters that remain unopened while they wrestle on top of the bed -- sometimes like tigers, sometimes like dolphins. Every touch burnt like an iron bar, hot from the flames, but there was no other choice.
Choice? Such a mockery.
Such a foolish, wasteful mockery.
The letters, unopened, are thrown into the wind in strips. No one can see how those caring words on parchment tear at him, crash away like the sea against the cliff face in a storm, breaking down all the defences...
None can see.
Their eyes just slide straight past him.
They fly the carpet sometimes. Make it stop, hovering above the churning, angry sea that reaches for them. Wrestle. Fight. Penetrate. Offer themselves up to the Gods. Fly back, back to the cliff, back to the falling-apart porch on the crest of the...
More letters burn, even the ones that smoke and explode and yell at him before he gets them into the fire in time... their yells are lost in the silence of seagulls and crashing waves.
Even if they were there, they couldn't see him.
Several paces to the edge of the cliff. Several places back to the house.
If he were to fall, none would see him.
Only the blonde man would be able to search and weep and search until his borrowed body washed back up on the shore, too broken to be used again.
A seagull screeches.
A daze is lifted. He remembers that the blonde man is coming again today, which means there will be a roaring fire of letters once more.
None can see him.
He likes it that way.
- finished -