Photo by Intothewoods29

NO DAY AT THE BEACH

In October the woman came to the beach to kill herself, but she wanted a tea first, her last. She sat by the café window facing the water, to watch the tide glide over the sand, and imagined herself washed up there after failing to sink to the bottom. She supposed she might have to let go of her notion that rocks in her pockets was too theatrical. Besides, she asked herself, what was a beached, bloated corpse buzzing with flies? She didn’t want to try to give that a name. The tea, she remembered, she should drink her tea. The woman raised the mug to her lips–no, no, still too hot.

Setting it down she saw a little girl bundled up for colder weather toddle onto the beach from the parking lot. She was alone and no parents or siblings followed after her. Mom and Dad sent her out of the car so they could have a proper quarrel, the woman thought. But this was another notion she had to reconsider, as the child moved with prepossession, premeditation, despite being thick in everything she wore: coat, hat, gloves, even her eyeglasses. She stopped exactly at a red plastic pail half-buried on its side, which the woman hadn’t noticed, even though her view of the beach from the cafe window surely was superior to that of a myopic girl’s from the parking lot. The woman scolded herself, why wasn’t she taking in every detail of her final moments?

She didn’t give an answer, she watched the girl bending her knees and tugging the pail upright and out of the sand by its handle. The cafe window was too thick, the woman couldn’t hear it, but she saw the girl squealing victoriously and then emptying the pail of its old summer contents and lumbering like an astronaut on the moon to the shoreline. The tide was gentle enough the child could meet it with the pail between her feet, filling it with saltwater. The woman noted this with mixed emotions; congratulating herself on a detail taken in, and also concerning herself that the tide wouldn’t be strong enough to push her body back into shore, that she’d be picked out of the ocean by randy, unscrupulous fishermen gone 30 days at sea without sight of a woman, dead or alive.

Her tea was still too hot to drink.

The little girl was active again, lugging the pail back to its original spot on the beach, oblivious to the water streaming through a hole in its bottom. For some reason the woman couldn’t ascertain, the girl wanted to dump water on the sand and when she overturned the bucket only trickles and dribbles came out. She was confused, the woman saw; however, rather than investigate the pail the girl ran back to the water and filled it again and returned to the same result. When she did it twice more the woman was going to knock on the window and help the poor girl, use her mug as a visual aid, but what poor girl? The glass wasn’t too thick for laughter. Yes, if she leaned closer the woman could just barely hear it and now she could clearly see it, the girl was laughing as she filled the pail and the pail drained itself in a matter of fifty steps. Back and forth she continued, delighted, as if she were carrying a magic trick she had no interest in learning the secret to.

No, this will not do, the woman thought, up from her chair, her thighs bracing against the table. She rapped on the window. The child looked up and the woman closed her hand except for her forefinger she pointed into the glass. The girl, that fool girl, wasn’t looking at the window but in the direction of the parking lot, and she dropped the pail without losing her buoyancy and ran off the beach under someone else’s orders. The woman let out a hot, sharp breath as she sat down, and for a moment she fidgeted and couldn’t figure out what to do with her hands, leave them in her lap, on the table, clasped, unclasped.

She settled for her lap, unclasped, and she glared through the window at the beach and the pail with a hole in it the child had left a mystery. The woman told herself not to look at the pail when she went out there, she was to walk straight ahead into the water and keep going for as long as it took. She should get going, she thought, get her tea in a to-go cup. It was still so blessed hot and that damn fool little girl. The woman called over the waitress for a cup of ice, sounding angrier than she meant to, and for a bloody lunch menu while she was at it.