[lj idol] week eleven | "look around you, we don't have to wait..."
[the tendency to predict the future using trends and patterns from the past...]
*
Lily’s screaming trips a marionette’s dance across my fingertips.
I push my toes into the sodden sand, rainwater and seawater and brackish storm run-off, and watch as she flings herself into the rolling surf with the kind of abandon that terrifies me through to my core.
Lightening forks along the horizon and tungsten-coloured clouds shift, shift, shift in a low canopy above my head. Our being here is the culmination of more bad decisions than I care to tally up. This is nothing new. Lily’s school uniform is a discarded pile of pleats and checks beside me, black shoes stuffed with white socks and weighted down with a backpack that contains the homework we’re supposed to be doing.
“Let’s go to the beach,” she’d said in the minutes after our final class, rain dripping from the end of her nose, the against-school-policy mascara she insists is her right to wear trailing faded grey tracks from her lashes to her chin.
“Sure,” I’d said, nodding along like the robot I try so hard not to be but always, always, always am.
The weather may change.
Very little else ever does.
I shut my eyes and tilt my head back now. Let the slowing storm fill the contours of my face with rain and the familiar weight of longing, of love, of lust. I have drowned before, once, almost. Not quite. And I am no longer scared of the sensation.
I think I might be drowning now.
Thunder rolls across my collar bones, settles, heavy, against my chest. I open my eyes again when the rain stops.
“What are you doing?”
Lily is standing over me, a physical barricade between my skin and the sky. Her brows are pulled low, arms hanging limply by her sides. She is close enough that I can see goose bumps on her bare thighs and the ocean has turned her pale underwear opaque.
I force my eyes closed again for lack of a better option.
“I don’t know,” is all the answer I can manage. I never know anymore…
Her hands drop to my shoulders and give me a shake. The movement is just the rough side of playful and I shove her off with a shimmy, climb to my feet as she raises her palms in mock surrender.
“Come jump the waves with me,” she pleads, hair plastered to her cheeks and snaking its way errantly between her teeth as the wind whips and whirls.
“This is insane.” I shake my head to protest feebly, already feeling the familiar bend of my will to hers.
“Exactly,” she agrees, throws her arms skyward, spinning, spinning, spinning. “Exactly…”
The frothing waves are both warmer and rougher than I’d been expecting. The push and pull of the tide explodes against my midriff, threatens to send me to my knees in the churning surf again and again as my heart hammers out a marching band beat beneath my heaving ribs. I tell myself this is what fun feels like. Lick my lips as though the salty burn is something to savour while Lily’s fingers curl their way through mine and I jump and trip and fall.
And fall.
And fall.
Just like I did yesterday. Just like I will again tomorrow…
But instead of kicking up her heels and clearing the next wave, Lily drops suddenly, duck-dives into the swirling mass and disappears for a beat. For several beats perhaps.
She surfaces again, her back to me and her arms raised to shoulder height, like she’s offering herself to a God only she can fathom. My breath is held.
The decision to hold it, not a conscious one.
It never is.
And she turns then. I watch as her lips work their way around my name, the syllables swallowed silent in a thunderous clap. She is motionless.
And something has shifted. Changed forever in a single sonic boom.
The feet and inches of boiling surf between us disappear. And she’s right there, so close I can feel the heat of her breath on my face, the hesitant flutter of her fingertips in the curled ends of my sea-soaked hair.
This is not how it’s supposed to go.
“Sarah,” she says again, little more than a whisper, “do you want me to kiss you?”
*
previously on...
introduction
jayus
the missing stair
in another castle
nobody can ride your back if your back's not bent
build a better mouse-trap
step on a crack, break your mother's back
yes, and...
*
Lily’s screaming trips a marionette’s dance across my fingertips.
I push my toes into the sodden sand, rainwater and seawater and brackish storm run-off, and watch as she flings herself into the rolling surf with the kind of abandon that terrifies me through to my core.
Lightening forks along the horizon and tungsten-coloured clouds shift, shift, shift in a low canopy above my head. Our being here is the culmination of more bad decisions than I care to tally up. This is nothing new. Lily’s school uniform is a discarded pile of pleats and checks beside me, black shoes stuffed with white socks and weighted down with a backpack that contains the homework we’re supposed to be doing.
“Let’s go to the beach,” she’d said in the minutes after our final class, rain dripping from the end of her nose, the against-school-policy mascara she insists is her right to wear trailing faded grey tracks from her lashes to her chin.
“Sure,” I’d said, nodding along like the robot I try so hard not to be but always, always, always am.
The weather may change.
Very little else ever does.
I shut my eyes and tilt my head back now. Let the slowing storm fill the contours of my face with rain and the familiar weight of longing, of love, of lust. I have drowned before, once, almost. Not quite. And I am no longer scared of the sensation.
I think I might be drowning now.
Thunder rolls across my collar bones, settles, heavy, against my chest. I open my eyes again when the rain stops.
“What are you doing?”
Lily is standing over me, a physical barricade between my skin and the sky. Her brows are pulled low, arms hanging limply by her sides. She is close enough that I can see goose bumps on her bare thighs and the ocean has turned her pale underwear opaque.
I force my eyes closed again for lack of a better option.
“I don’t know,” is all the answer I can manage. I never know anymore…
Her hands drop to my shoulders and give me a shake. The movement is just the rough side of playful and I shove her off with a shimmy, climb to my feet as she raises her palms in mock surrender.
“Come jump the waves with me,” she pleads, hair plastered to her cheeks and snaking its way errantly between her teeth as the wind whips and whirls.
“This is insane.” I shake my head to protest feebly, already feeling the familiar bend of my will to hers.
“Exactly,” she agrees, throws her arms skyward, spinning, spinning, spinning. “Exactly…”
The frothing waves are both warmer and rougher than I’d been expecting. The push and pull of the tide explodes against my midriff, threatens to send me to my knees in the churning surf again and again as my heart hammers out a marching band beat beneath my heaving ribs. I tell myself this is what fun feels like. Lick my lips as though the salty burn is something to savour while Lily’s fingers curl their way through mine and I jump and trip and fall.
And fall.
And fall.
Just like I did yesterday. Just like I will again tomorrow…
But instead of kicking up her heels and clearing the next wave, Lily drops suddenly, duck-dives into the swirling mass and disappears for a beat. For several beats perhaps.
She surfaces again, her back to me and her arms raised to shoulder height, like she’s offering herself to a God only she can fathom. My breath is held.
The decision to hold it, not a conscious one.
It never is.
And she turns then. I watch as her lips work their way around my name, the syllables swallowed silent in a thunderous clap. She is motionless.
And something has shifted. Changed forever in a single sonic boom.
The feet and inches of boiling surf between us disappear. And she’s right there, so close I can feel the heat of her breath on my face, the hesitant flutter of her fingertips in the curled ends of my sea-soaked hair.
This is not how it’s supposed to go.
“Sarah,” she says again, little more than a whisper, “do you want me to kiss you?”
*
previously on...
introduction
jayus
the missing stair
in another castle
nobody can ride your back if your back's not bent
build a better mouse-trap
step on a crack, break your mother's back
yes, and...