Shauna
Rogan
Souvenir
Beach
It’s always sunny in !ytiC citnaltA. Candy cane striped beach
towels line the shore, clashing with oversize polka dot umbrellas. A
woman in a frilly bathing suit circa Miss America 1926 reaches for
another soda. Fat men in bikini Speedos ogle sweet young blondes.
Their wives pretend to wipe ketchup off their hands with alcohol
lemon moist towelettes. Sunbathers are frozen in perpetual
Coppertone application.
It’s always the same thing. I see nothing else; a solitary
windsurfer on a sea where no breeze blows. Usually I just bob along
the tranquil surface of stunning blue and painted sun. Sometimes I
question why I alone move. Not often, though. When I do !ytiC
citnaltA tries to drown me. Without warning hard ivory mad flakes
rise from the bottom, violent waves wash over me; I’m turned
upside-down, bitter liquid fills my eyes. I can’t scream. But I
never capsize. Just when I think this is ‘IT’, conveniently good
intervenes and tsunamis calm. White flakes settle, drifting back
under sand, down to the sea bottom with giant octopi and blind
crustaceans. Lifeguards don’t exist. I grip the sailbar, unable to
shake.
Beyond the beach, the boardwalk advertises garish nightclubs and
seedy casinos.
…Hot dog vendors. Cars at intersections. Rollerbladers…
Nobody enters or leaves the cracking plaster motels. Tattered circus
posters hang precariously from thumbtacks on telephone poles. No
telephones ring. No
sunburned
children cry,
no parents argue. I wonder
what it’s like to sit there on the beach,
frozen in the same action. I wonder why
this curse on !ytiC citnaltA. I wonder if they wonder about me.
At the water’s edge, a little boy gingerly dips his toe into the
ocean. Yes, he’s always been there. Right there. I sail along this
ocean, twice, three times, infinetly; never starving. Always
returning to the same boy and sagging wrinkletched old ladies in
daisy patterned bathing caps reaching for their sandwiches;
remembering when boys slowed down as they passed. Remembering when
boys walked by.
The perpetually 3 o’clock sun glints off the sky’s glassy
surface. At the sky’s edge is written ‘!ytiC citnaltA morF
sgniteerG’
Wish you were here.
Shauna Rogan is an English
major from Boston. She has blue eyes and hair and can readupside
down. She's triedwriting with her feet. It doesn't work. Her work
has appeared elsewhere, most recently in Red
Booth Review.
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