Summer is dead to me

Summer is dead to me.

The sand grates under my toes as I crush my feet into the compounded mixture of dead animals, plants and life. The grains of golden delight slip through my fingers like an hourglass fading in vitality as time rushes out though the narrow opening. Gone.

People play in the water and on the sand, soaking up the last vestiges of summer heat before the cool autumn infiltrates and school or work dampens the remaining enjoyment. Chubby-cheeked children build sloppy sandcastles under the suspicious supervision of protective parents, and adults lay like seals on the sand to toast their fragile skins to deliciously crackled browns and reds.

I raise one sandy hand. It’s rather odd really that children play amongst the remains of a desolate world beneath the sea. Flushed out and spread across the land under the sun to shrivel away. Lost in the masses. I wonder if this is what heaven is like. Do all the human souls fall into the earth like spiralling feathers, drifting lightly towards a world so different from our own? Or do we rise on strings as tenuous as the tides towards the Geppetto of the sky by our feet, as the blood rushes to our heads and we stare down at the world we’ve left behind, already so much like a distorted memory?

‘Mia!’

I raise my blood encrusted hand to my eyes to squint against the summer sun.

My friend waves from where she’s sat at the edge of the sea, legs together like a tail swishing in the shallow air of the ocean, liquid oxygen.

‘Come join me, it’s so nice and cold!’

Her hair lays in straggled ropes about her head, catching my stare as I immobilise into stone. Rooted to the spot. She looks at me like I’m the sunstone allowing her to tell time, but I’m soon eclipsed by a much larger shadow, a tower of rocky muscle equally frozen by her eyes.

‘Alec! You come join me too!’

Her siren song lures him in irresistibly, leaving me frozen in agonising stillness, every muscle locked in terrified isolation.

‘Come onnn Mia! We’re at the beach, you can daydream at home later!’

‘Yeah, come on Mimi.’ Alec’s broad voice rumbles like thunder over my head.

‘Mia! You promised!’ My friend’s voice strikes like lightning straight down to my heart, ripping through tendons and flesh through the soles of my feet and into the innumerable bodies below.

‘Maybe later. I’m tired.’ My voice creaks out like the dust on clothes in an ancient wardrobe. A light and inconsequential cloud that fades greyly into the background.

‘Fine, but later– eek!’ Summer doesn’t get to finish her sentence before Alec scoops her up and carries her away into the ocean like a kelpie with his beautiful princess lying languidly in his arms with her hands entangled in his curly mane.

She laughs through love-swollen lips as he nestles his head into her neck and gently lowers them both into the crystal depths.

I pick at the sand on my hands but can’t seem to remove their stain, no matter how hard I scrub the spots won’t fade. The spots of sin. Sinful spots.

I stand and turn to walk away from Summer and Alec as they play in the sea together, sleek dolphins flickering their fins as much as peacocks flaunting their feathers.

I trudge up the ever-growing list of casualties to walk down the sandbank as the cool evening begins to settle about me.

Summer is dead to me. It is over, and so are we.