sand

by Scott Ortolano

Always one step ahead, Brooke already had the car in neutral. Amory, dodging the summer plague of buzzing June bugs, bent down and leaned his shoulder into the front bumper, gently urging the car down the narrow drive until they were safely beyond earshot. Winking mischievously, Brooke turned the key and the car, a sooty yellow from pine pollen, hummed to life. Easing the door open, Amory slipped into the passenger seat, and they shot off into a clear night of possibility.

Brooke applied lip gloss and moved rhythmically, one hand upturned, the other gliding silently over the leather steering wheel, a tapered brush poised delicately between her forefingers. Amory tried to catch the lyrics of the song, but found that her flowing body crowded out his other senses, slowing time, as the seatbelt strained with each jolt of the car’s wheels.

This had not been Brooke’s first stop, and Amory eagerly took the pills that she pressed against his lips. He did not know what they were or how many he’d taken, but none of that mattered. He grabbed one of the half-empty water bottles scattered about the car, still warm from the day’s unrelenting heat and, well trained in the art, swallowed the cluster at once, feeling them rattling down his throat with the knowledge of an old friend.

Brooke’s unsteady hands had drawn blood, and smiling behind a gaze darkly accented with split wing eyeliner, she, gently this time, pressed her fingers to his lips, rubbing them along the broken surface before slipping them into her mouth. With a wink, she slowly rolled her tongue across the stained veneer of her acrylic nails, painted with a moon dotted by triple stars.

“Vampire! you’ll have to stake me.” She teased, an old slayer-inspired joke from a time when her blue bedroom walls had been enough of a refuge to contain their growing desperation.

Before Amory could respond, she spun the wheel wildly into the drive of a SunTrust bank. Like all buildings in Burnt Harbor, the bank’s yellow stucco foundation was elevated to avoid flooding in the now annual “once-a-hundred-year” summer storms. While most elevations were only to the height insurance companies required, this lot, through the winding efforts of a drunk tractor operator, had reached a height and shape both beautiful and absurd, creating what local teens reverently called “the rollercoaster.”

Yelling with exhilaration as the car climbed up the embankment, Brooke shook her head spasmodically. Dark tendrils flowed outward, bouncing in tune with the music yet following a structure beyond hearing. Blue streaks and true auburn comingled in a transcendent blur.

The pills took their course as the car fishtailed back to the main road. Glancing over, Amory watched as Brooke’s face drifted and dissolved, ebbing away into the headlights of a passing car; the oblivion holding terror and beauty against the dark skyline.

Amory looked up again to find them moving across the Island Bridge. Wind from the open window caressed his face, with stars beckoning seductively in the darkness beyond. Pulled by their force, he wedged himself into the opening and, extending every muscle, stretched far out into the abyss. The stars pulsed and spoke to him, ringing sounds that fragmented and reformed into indiscernible words. Amory reached his head further, feeling their light wrap around his body. The cool of the night contrasted with his own heat, and the melodic crash of the white caps below floated upward, cooing in a textured lullaby. But as he closed his eyes and released, their siren call upended into a scream and, with an unexpected force, the horizon spun and Amory gasped as his forehead smashed into the headrest.

“What the fuck are you doing, lunatic??!!” Brooke shouted, the car recovering its bearing as she resettled into the seat. The syllables slowly coalesced from soundwaves into words, and Amory, comprehending again, took a breath and looked once more out at the stars. But their call had ceased.

“Just getting some air,” he responded, winking as he readapted to his usual mischievous cover.

Laughing uncontrollably, she rolled her eyes, shutting her heavy lashes and falling into something closer to empathy than comprehension. Opening them slowly, she glanced at Amory and, sliding her tongue into the narrow gap between her teeth, leaned over to meet him. The car swerved once more, rumbling as its tires momentarily straddled the untested treads of the bridge’s guardrail.

Later, on the beach, they stripped off their clothes and dove into the dark sea, wading through waters alight with flashes of bioluminescence. The shimmering waves glinted against Brooke’s olive skin, drops transforming into translucent portals in the moonlight. They moved leisurely, with practiced and unhurried shuffles, feeling the sand between their toes and drawing out time until they reached the pronounced shoal that skirted the coast. Here, the water reduced to knee deep, and they sat, feeling the soft brushstrokes of the outgoing tide. Amory slowly moved his fingers back and forth. The water slipped easily between them.

“Got you!!!” Brooke yelled suddenly, as her foot exploded from the still surface.

Gripped firmly between the slight curl of her toes rested a brown sand dollar, relict from a lost age. When Amory’s father lived, they had been almost as thick as the silt below. Collecting the sand dollars’ hidden angel wings formed an Easter tradition for his family, holding a magic that had faded—with the death of his father and with the flows of fresh water emerging from the gated communities that now crowded the shoreline.

Brooke held the creature in the flat of her hand, and Amory, remembering now the joyous calls of his siblings, and hearing again the voice of his father, began gently moving his fingers over the rough, sandpaper bristles, tracing the surface of the star pattern and moving, with awe, to the center below. Their free hands intertwined, and they looked out, to see a world fallen but still brilliant with stars.

A not-photo of Scott Ortolano

BIO: Scott Ortolano (he/him) is an English professor at Florida SouthWestern State College. His poetry and prose have recently appeared in Ponder Review, Across The Margin, The Hoolet’s Nook, Rathalla Review, and Apocalypse Confidential. He has spent his life in Southwest Florida, and his writing is driven by a deep sense of love and concern for a world and region undergoing great waves of change. More of his work is available at www.SOrtolano.com