Ain’t Life a Beach

                                             Day began.

‘Cold filled the air, made it denser; its presence - due to a lack of ice or snow - was invisible, but everything within its reach felt the icy touch, an unwanted caress.  Its smell suggested purity, a cleansing that would wipe away the effects that heat brings to existence - the explosion of fecundity and passion to exist and grow the summer sun brings. The absence that death brings was instilled in its touch, as all warm blooded creatures instinctively knew. Grey sky and weakened light accompanied the cold, as did the sound of lapping waves as they obeyed the pull of the moon and made their way up the pebble filled beach. The implacable waves were the only movement that brought the place to life and prevented it from being a tableau of the emptiness of existence.’

“Enough, enough, I can’t stand another word,” wailed pebble 107092; “always with the death, death.” Its smooth surface unable to wear the frown it couldn’t perform.

                    A solitary seagull made its

                way across the grey sky

                scanning below for any signs

                of food and sounding

                its raucous call.

“Have you no heart, pebble 107092?” protested pebble 12887236, in a vibration that would have not been out of place on the face of a soap actor in one of their execrable love scenes, which are about as convincing as the real life daily lives they are supposed to present a verisimilitude of.

“Of course not, I’m a pebble.” The obviousness of this statement increased the seeming silence of the small bay the pebbles found themselves in. To say that it was one ‘lay’ or ‘found a home’ in would infer a choice and will which were denied to them both, like the very Earth itself and its progress around the sun, or the land and the seasons which force change on it like a child as it grows from its safe-feeling innocence into adulthood.

“Excuses, excuses, always the clever excuses,” said pebble 12887236 with a familiar air of resigned exasperation, like Sisyphus when he stares up at the path ahead. “Where’s your soul? Where’s your essence?”

“Always with the ‘soul,’ with the ‘essence.’ I’m a pebble not Wordsworth or Keats. If you want that nonsense, go over to 11673, she’s always trying to capture the meaning of existence, usually on an urn.” The influence of Woody Allen’s religious roots in the characterization in him films ricocheted off 107902 like accusations to a malignant narcissist.

                    White and grey tipped wings

                manipulated air around them;

                streamlined  shape of the body

                slipped through seemingly empty

                space,  cold atmosphere of Winter:

                            a still life painter

                         with a nihilistic touch

                whose brush was bristled with entropy

                and decay and palette an imbalance

                of live and dead colours.

“A joker, always the joker; like I can roll over to that side of the beach!” Non existent arms were raised and held up to the gloom in search of an agreement at the idiocy that 12887236 was hearing. The sought after agreement was like the non existent arms, however.

“Then do me a favour and leave out the gloom and death. I’m freezing my granular matrixes off here,” said 107902 in a shivering voice, if he had one.

“Oh, so you have no ‘essence’ but you feel the cold!” Plato’s archetype eyes rolled in absence of real ones.

                   Still alone, the seagull rose

                fell and circled, a pattern

                mirrored in the landscape

                as the days and weeks passed

                and the image presented to the

                sky withered down to a sun

                and heat deprived minimum

                 – a survivor of Dachau -

“I said ‘always,’ didn’t deny. Of course I have essence. I’m here. I’m cold. I have protons, neutrons and electrons whizzing around me in so much space that I’m not sure if I’m really here. I never said I didn’t, I just wish that it would be warmer like summer.” Both pebbles attempted to turn their backs on each other, which, for obvious reasons, was as effective as man and woman agreeing what to do in the evening after a day spent in the sales or out watching his mate’s team play. The intention was clear, though, as the pebbles surrounding them knew from all too frequent experience.

“The summer, the summer, you and the summer.  ‘Oh the heat, the warm air, the soothing water…’ Pah. More like the feet, feet, endless, remorseless feet.” Memories of summers past fuelled the repetition of ‘feet’ and set a deliberate dichotomy to the idyll of the longed for summer of 12887236. 107902 who loved the symbolism behind dichotomies, dualisms and all the opposites which are used to explain existence that his granular matrixes were incapable of comprehending always appreciated the way 12887236 used them.

“Feet I can put up with. Well, apart from the heavy oh so heavy ones that take me back to my birth. I tell you, feet are nothing to the pressure I was under then.’ The boom, boom of the planned pun echoed from its non utterance as a mischievous light filled absent eyes and forged the same grin.

“You and your puns. Any excuse for a pun.” If a pebble could express the loss of the will to live, 12887236 would have expressed it as he felt the affects of in his, non possible, view a pun too far.

“What do you expect with all your moaning and sighing. You sound like a kettle on a range as it’s coming to the boil; you’d make my blood boil sometimes, if I had any.” Further mirth and schadenfreude filled faux malice showed itself in 107902’s super string theory vibrations. He loved winding his neighbour up.

                       before burgeoning once again in a

                form that reflected the glory of life:

                full of shapes, sizes and colours,

                a collage of the pleasant and prosperous

                now that banishes out the shades of

                grey that lead to the ultimate darkness.

“Who could blame me with the cold and the grey and the long nights and the freezing water. I’d drown myself if I could,” Proust would have noticed the Bergman like oxymoronic revelling in the cold nihilism of existence as a speciality of 12887236 and one – like all often repeated and assimilated foibles – that didn’t register in his consciousness, as many people supposed the changing of the seasons would fail to register on all of the inanimate objects that formed the beach; in this, they were wrong: leave a book on  a table by an uncurtained window for a year and the passing seasons will leave their mark, and would comment as before before letting 12887236 continue “especially if I could get away from your ‘I don’t trust muscles, they seem rather shellfish.’ ‘Is the sea taking the piss! it’s just weed all over me.’ A pebble can only take so much before he cracks up.” Even though smoothness and non expression was his natural state, 107902 found it difficult to hide his feelings of his success as 12887236 emanated these words from his atomic core.

“Calm yourself, 12887236, you’re eggsaggerating it, surely, over egging the point.” The absence of the (due to the by now plainly stated and probably over played conceit) absence of an angry retort was as conspicuous as an elephant at a fleas tea party.

                       The raucous cry pierced the air

                 once more calling for another

                 so that both could be joined

                 and look down upon this part

                 of the world that endured Winter’s

                 grip with the same resilience as the

                 feathers above accepted the icy air.

“That’s it. I’ve had it. Next high tide I’m moving,” said 12887236, in exasperated frustration and attempting with all his might to do the impossible – thanks to that bastard gravity- to move on his own accord.

“Don’t forget to wave as you go,” replied 107902 mirthfully.

‘The empty shoreline stretched in front of them, a desolate and unamused smile between the land and the sea. Grey gradually began to turn to black and the encroaching tide reclaimed what it thought should be its, smothering the beach in a possessive presence.’

(“Always having to have the last word,” vibrated its way through to the surface of the sea and out into the darkness beyond – where in the aftermath of the Big Bang these vibrations would end up in their journey of continual presence and absence…)