All four of us got in a car and drove away. We travelled just a few miles to the coast, found a beach. Two of us stood where the sand stops. Two of us ran to the waves. It was cold, the wind. It didn't smell like the sea, though. There's supposed to be a tradeoff, isn't there? Your ears freeze and ache but you get to smell the sea. But I couldn't smell anything. I could only hear the machinery of the ocean churning cooly and see her walking along the shore. She knelt, sitting on her ankles, and picked up some rocks; and for a moment she was perfect. She looked like a saint's design, a statue in a cathedral: perched on her heels, red hair blown back from her face by the bellows of the sea. I stood with a dirty flannel shirt and a trenchcoat flowing cinematically in the wind, watching her. It would be unfair to describe her skin as like porcelain; for the stuff is cold, and it cures you that way. It has little soul but absorbs your touch with militant eagerness. It serves its purpose. Her skin, though it had the same absorbing qualities, had an independant conciousness to it, a sentient grace. Gorgeous and warm.
She picked a few small rocks from the wet sand and walked back towards me. She walked past, away from the city and towards the foggy mountains in the infinite horizon. Her footsteps lingered intelligently in the wet sand. Mine were eroded in seconds by the breaking waves. I pondered whether there was any poetry to this; I decided that there was not and followed her, hoping she was wanting as much as I was to run forever into the clouded mountains. She pontificated briefly on the nature of the pebbles, wondering if they'd been around the world or come from mountains somewhere. I told her I wanted to walk into the ocean forever. Her voice ran over my eyes, like foamy bubbles rubbing my temples to alieve a headache, and into each pore of my face while she planned her adventures, her travels among the mountains, her treks across her winged conception of the world. We stood still and imagined ourselves high in the air, above the aching wind but no less alive.
I turned to see her skin again, and she was looking at me. The impulse came like a phone ringing harshly to turn away. I couldn't. I jumped, and watched her eyes while she watched mine. I prayed her view was a fraction of what I saw. She smiled and tried to make me laugh and break the stare, but neither of us could. The wind dried her eyes after a while, and she closed them deliberately, apologetically. We turned back to the sky and thought about being far away.
An hour later the beach was cold and so was the girl's skin. She had very poor circulation, turned blue and purple a lot of the time, veined across her fingers. Everything I wanted to write about her was a fabrication and my mind had punished us again because she was not my seraph. Her eyes were never windows to her soul, as the cliche would fool me, and her smile was straight and clean because she'd had aesthetic orthadonture. Her hair was dyed from it's usual treebark brown. My nose was large and my teeth were full of silver fillings. The surfaces that did not have silver fillings were spotted lightly with wear. My toenails were very long and I had clipped my fingernails too short, so that they felt stubby and it hurt to touch anything. The cold of the beach air did not help. She was back with the others at the end of the sand and I was chasing seagulls like a cruel seventh grade boy. I didn't catch any of them, but I stepped on a crab while I was running. It's shell didn't protect it at all; in fact I imagine the shards from its back stabbed it up something awful, maybe even cut into its heart. The small pincher arm was still opening and closing, but the large one was smashed into a raw stew on the rock.
I crouched down on my knees for a long time looking at this. Water from the sand and the trailing ends of waves slowly crawled up my pants. I looked up after what was probably a very long time and she was standing there, waiting for an answer. She had asked me something. "I don't know." She picked up the small arm and popped it out of the salty socket and put it in her pocket. I touched the meat that had squeezed out of the body with one finger and tasted my finger. It tasted like seawater, nothing profound.
She walked back to them. There was a small dark spot in her pants where she'd put the crab's arm.
Back.