It’s a fiction Monday. I’m coming back to the blossom of things, the rhythm of forming prose. This is one of those pieces that came quickly and harsh, with a sense of violence, and needs to be written. So it has been done. Though I imagine this is one of those pieces that will make a good friend of mine shake her head and say, “So … so much is happening here.” At the end of the story, there is a translation of the French idiom that is the title of this particular story.
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la bible comme lu par le diable
She shifted on the blanket and ran a hand through her honeyed strands. She leaned back, looking out over the water, the waves growing harsh in the morning as the sun stretched long over the sea and sand. They had snuck a bottle of wine from the bar at the house party and had gone down to the beach in the darkness, under the watch of a half moon and a cluster of milky stars. They had built a fire with driftwood, had held each other close well before the first glass had been drunk, but closer by the time the bottle was nearly finished. They had fallen asleep intertwined on the blanket, his hand on her thigh and hers on his cheek. She had worn a blue silk dress that rustled under his touch and his green tie had been put to use by a furtive tug made by her right hand.
A dull roar settled around them in the night, the sea dancing with the thick dark. The lovers kept each other warm, but were careful, stealing only what was just within their right to take, and expecting no more than the chastity of lips finding lips and hands intertwined. Her hair caught on the blanket once, a bobby-pin snagging and pulling a golden curl free. He had lazily wrapped it around his index finger while she had whispered something to him about atonement and Holy Ghost.
He had been sad. Sad like he had been in the old days. She had pulled away from him once, but he had drawn her back.
He had slept soundly and she had woken once, a seagull’s cry piercing the early morning calm, before she too fell asleep and was quieted, if not at peace.
But it was morning now.
The world was no longer as soft as it had been before. She felt the sand in the folds of her dress, fidgeted on the blanket, and swatted a fly that lazily drifted past her face. She studied her hands, her fingernails, and felt a few granules buried beneath them, pressed into her flesh. She scowled, setting her jaw as she looked back out over the water. There were clouds in the east, rolling in quickly, heavy and low. Her eyes slid closed and she felt a wave of nausea ripple down her frame.
“We should go back.”
Her voice rebuked the sudden wind that rolled off the water, the waves tumbling in, faster than before. “People will wonder where we are and if they come looking for us we’ll never hear the end of it.”
He looked up from the notebook he had been writing in, finishing the second stanza of a poem. The poem had come to his mind that morning when he watched her slowly disentangle herself from his grasp, her earrings—turquoise, dangling—gently scraping the side of his face. She had slipped to the farthest edge of the blanket without exactly sitting off it, a scene that illustrated perhaps a little too perfectly what their relationship had always been.
He set the pen down in his notebook, looking at her from over the wayfarers that he had concealed in his suit jacket for the party, but had slipped on as soon as he was awake. His left hand softly groped the blanket. He wanted a cigarette. “People have always wondered what happened to us and we have yet to hear the end of it.” He looked back down to his notebook, took up his pen, and began to write once more.
Wind ripped across the waves and caught in her hair, golden strands set free by the dalliance on the blanket, now loosed in a sort of violent array, dancing around her head so that when he looked up, seeing her from behind, he saw her as Medusa, while she saw flecks of gold riding along the approaching waves and kissing the sky. Her earrings gently beat against the side of her face.
He looked away from her down the shoreline. A lighthouse stood away from them, overlooking the water. He considered it, its darkness, and wondered why they hadn’t seen its light the night before when they had made their way across the beach. Shifting to see it better, his arm caressed the jacket that he had taken off to lie down and he could feel the lump in the pocket press against his arm. He rested there a moment, felt it dig into his flesh, and then he pulled away, leaning up to look back at her.
She was still looking out to the waves, but sat suddenly upright with start. Something on the shore caught her eye, something shimmering, dancing, and she stood with curiosity, looking toward it. Her dress pushed back against her legs when it met the wind, sand sliding off her form and cascading behind her, catching in his eyes as they peaked over glasses, causing him to wince, then swear, momentarily blinded and left pulling the glasses off so he could rub the sand from his eyes. He swore again.
When he could finally see once more, though with a subtle blur from the thin layer of water that had slid over his eyes, he caught sight of her languid form set into frenzy as she sprinted barefooted down toward the water, her hair rippling about her head, the morning sun, peeking from behind the grey clouds, catching the locks of golden splendor and setting them alight as she ran. He placed his notebook aside and his hand once over the lump in his jacket, then rose, following her curiously but slowly, as if to come upon her too quickly would scare her like a doe and she would flee from him again, as all the times before, but this time too far for him to find.
“It’s dying!”
She was standing over a rainbow trout that had been beached. The creature stared up at them, flapping uncontrollably, and the violence of its convulsions against the sand seemed as loud as the waves that rushed in only a few feet from where it had been abandoned. She looked back at him, a dampness in her eyes, “You have to do something. Throw it back into the sea! Save it, please!”
He looked at her incredulously, then looked to the trout. Its mouth flapped at him, forming prophetic words, its body continuing to writhe, struggling to be noticed. A lump formed in his throat and he swallowed, then placed his hands into his pockets and shook his head, brunette strands gently flecked with sand. “It’s just a stupid fish. I’m not touching it. Let it die.”
He looked away from her, down the shoreline toward the lighthouse that stood in the distance. It was painted red with white trim, but showed signs of age and wear, withstanding too many winds, too many waves. Perhaps that was why there had been no light from it the night before. Perhaps it had not given light for years.
“What?” The surprise caught in her throat. She looked at his turned head and then back down to the fish. She wanted to cry, but felt silly for it. She made once to pick it up, but withdrew sharply when its convulsions began to slow and its mouth began to quiver with the slightest force. She couldn’t bring herself to touch it, though its glassy eye stared up at her, pleading.
A great, final rapture took its body and it was still.
She looked at it blankly, disbelieving, a tear sliding down her right cheek. At first a tremble went up her legs, then it was in her arms. Slowly she knelt, blindly looking down at the space in front of her, gathering the damp sand around body and sliding it toward the deceased. Like building a sandcastle, gathering the piles, shaping the foundation. She took a handful, sprinkled it over the top of it, and repeated. She repeated again and again, until it was nearly covered. Then her hands gently brushed the top of the sand, keeping her from touching the dead itself, but connecting her, she thought, to it nonetheless.
He kept his gaze on the lighthouse, kept his hands in his pocket, until he heard the scratching noise of the sand. He turned back, staring at her with a kind of dethatched fascination. There was a moment when he felt that he should kneel too and help her, but it passed as quickly as it came, pressed out of his soul by another violent swat of the wind.
“What are you doing?” He asked.
“Burying it,” she whispered. “It’s what you should do to dead things. You should burry them.”
Rage overcame him. He stepped forward, stamping his right foot down on the subtle inclination that marked the body. It erupted, letting out a groan as its entrails bubbled up from the sand and the seawater mixed with it, receiving into the depths of the darkness of the earth.
“You could have picked it up yourself and saved it!” He screamed at her, pulling his foot back and kicking the sand onto her dress. It landed across her left breast and trailed to her heart, a mixture of sand, seawater, and fish blood. “You could have saved it, but you’re willing to burry it?”
She leaned back onto her heels, her knees pressing hard into the silk dress and staining it in the wet sand as her torso had been stained. She did not raise her voice or make to reproach him. A cold certainty had settled in her eyes and she looked at him with a sense of deep knowing.
“Consider it a metaphor.” She spoke softly, but there was no mishearing her.
A wind came off the sea once more. Her hair danced, whipping across her face. His shirt and pants clung fast to his body. The sand that covered the body was caught up, drifting between them as it unearthed a glimpse of the corpse. The waves grew louder and closer, a spark of lightening split the sky. He turned his back on her and began to walk back to the blanket. After a moment, she rose too and followed behind him, her bare feet digging deep into the sand.
As she walked, the sand on her dress began to slowly fall away, dripping back onto the shore and becoming no more unique than any of the other wet granules left behind. There was a heaviness to the way she moved, a weakness in her step. She knew what was to come, but she hated him for it.
He was collecting his notebook, dusting the sand from its cover. He picked up his jacket, felt for the lump inside it, closed his eyes for a moment, and then found his resolve. He turned, but stopped when he saw her.
She had approached just to the foot of the blanket, but did not set a foot on it. Her eyes were marked with tears, but her lips were set in a soft, surrendered smile. She had been watching him, lines of defeat marking her forehead.
She took a deep breath, felt the burn of her soul catch in her throat, and then spoke. “Don’t forget to wear red today, Thomas.” She swallowed. “It’s Pentecost.”
He did not acknowledge her, staring at her with the hollow gaze of an empty man. Instead, he looked down and folded his notebook closed then set off in the direction of the lighthouse, under the grey sky, as the sun was completely hidden by the clouds.
She did not watch him go, but gathered the blanket up, the sand spilling out across the shore and dancing in the wind. She collected her shoes, the empty wine bottle, and the empty foil wrapper of his cigarettes that he had discarded the night before. She made her way up toward the houses, feeling the grass crunch beneath her feet, hearing the sound carried on the wind, and when she heard the gunshot in the distance, she did not turn, but kept on her way, away from the lighthouse.
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The title is a French idiom, which means: “The devil reading the Scriptures.”
© 2011, Preston. All rights reserved.
