Horseshoe

Myfanwy Collins

The path in the morning is covered in faces. Frosted over sand, blue shadows form mouths and light golden crests, noses. Faces that scream the sun to the horizon. Dune grass is yellow but not bent. It whispers that snow is coming. It says that days are warm still but at night there is a chill or a frost. The grass is ready to die.
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Black, cormorants are one giant noise at the edge of the water. Gulls join in but aren't welcome, really. When disturbed, the birds rise, looping and spinning, an extension of what is left behind, a whale’s flipper, a seal’s tail. Some emerge from below water to the air, making of themselves an opposition to the usual fish dive, water dripping off wings as they flap, flap, flap. Most fly low, skimming the surface until they become the surges and the pulls, until they become the waves.
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The sun brings sense to all that is misunderstood: the faces are just footprints; the grass, almost green; the birds, resume fishing. By midday the wind sends the waves breaking over sand, rock, leaves. A desiccated lobster trap, half covered in sand becomes a burial mound. The shifting ground loses hardness and becomes squishy, difficult to maneuver. A man sends his dog over and over again into the water in search of a tossed ball. The dog retrieves, swims, lands, shakes. Repeats the same action over and over. They become part of the waves, organic and rhythmic motion.
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Later, shadows snake down from the dunes. The only warmth is at shoreline where the sun slivers into water. A breeze picks up and sends leaves scuttling across the sand. Though there are no trees for miles, the improbable leaves stationed as shoreline detritus, forming a mosaic of browns and yellows. They wreath themselves around the carcasses of horseshoe crabs, half-eaten terns.
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By nightfall, let the surf have its way with the sand. Open the window a crack and listen to the moaning of the wind and realize that the same wind would put its mouth to the ear of a man walking in the dark and invite him in. The man would climb leg over leg into the sea and paddle out through the waves until they would suck him under. It would feel like he was asleep but everyone--the grass, the feathers, the leaves, the shells--would know that he was dying. In the morning, his face would be marked blue and gold on the path to the sea, welcoming the day with his own scream for sunrise. He would be so easy to miss among all the others but would be so noted by those who known him once.