Creative Muses January 2007 Prompt #5
James Bond walked down the beach at dusk. He was biding his time until next morning’s flight back to London. He was smoking, barely conscious of the sunset. His mind was fixed on the memory of his parents. He remembered their voices, their warnings, their laughter, the obligatory wonder they shared with him as he brought something new out of the water: first a rock, then a shell, then a dead starfish. When he tried to pull a live fish out of the water, they would command that he put it back. They’d buy him a fish when they got back home. They did, in fact, do this, and James tended to the fish devotedly until it died. He did the same for the next one, and the one after that. He did this until his parents died. Then he no longer saw the need for a pet. They always died in the end, so what was the point of growing so devotedly attached?
Bond exhaled a plume of smoke. He didn’t like thinking about his parents. It always lead him down a spiral to the bitter truth of his life: everything dies. That starfish, when he pulled it out of the water, was already dead. He was too young to know it, too young to care. To him it was a precious treasure. Bond pulled the cigarette butt from his lips and flicked it into the sand. He started to trail his way to the boardwalk, to one of the various restaurants or pubs where he could sit, eat, drink, and forget. It was time to throw himself back into life so he could ignore that it was quickly coming to an end.