Seagull Summer: A Novella

  * * * *

  “Hey!”

  I open my eyes, and a huge mass of light blinds me. I reflexively shoot my arm up to shield my face from its glory. Or, at least, that’s what I try to do. My arms don’t move. I hear laughter. It’s my wonderful bride and my adorable son. I wonder what’s so funny even as I realize that I can’t move my other arm, either. Or my legs. Then I become aware of a pressure sitting on my chest. They’re laughing louder. The sun is still in my eyes, and I try to squint through it, to see what’s going on.

  Something’s poking my chest, and I can see my darling boy with a sharp piece of driftwood in my mind’s eye. He’s laughing like it’s the funniest thing he’s seen since Chicken Little’s pants fell down in that movie he got for his birthday.

  “Ouch! That hurts! Quit it!”

  A shadow crosses over me, and I can see two seagulls standing on the sand where my chest should be. There’s goldfish—the snack, not the pet—sprinkled over me. A sharp beak plunges into the sand, and I feel it again. Death by bird pecks. My family can’t stop laughing. Wonderful.

  “Shoo!” I shout.

  The birds pause, looking at me as if considering my request. Or at least the absurdity of it. “Get away!”

  They go back to pecking, and I think they’re now laughing along with the neighbors who have since joined my loved ones in humiliating me.

  With great effort, I sit up, the sand covering me first cracking and then falling away as I rise, reborn, from the earth. The birds aren’t laughing now; they’re getting the hell away from me before I can snap their necks and jam their heads into the hairy ears of those sitting closest to us.

  “Funny,” I say, looking down at the red marks on my chest. One of them is oozing.

  Douglas is running in circles, throwing his arms up in the air and laughing so hard I’m not entirely convinced it’s genuine. He’s just acting nuts.

  “First shit on my face, and then you feed me to the birds. What’s next?”

  “You’ll have to wait and see,” she says. She gives me a look that I know well. Not because I see it often, but because it’s impossible to forget. Suddenly, I can’t wait for my little sport to go to sleep tonight.

  3

  I wake up in the middle of the night for some, unknown reason. Probably because the small, stiff bed is killing my back. The A/C is blowing away in the window across from us. A streetlight is peeking through the curtains, and I can see shapes of framed pictures that I know by heart. It’s strange how familiar the place is to me after spending just one week a year here.

  I look over and pull my share of the blankets out from under Samantha. She hates when I do this, but why should she get to sleep cocooned in warmth while I’m left to endure the frosted air blasting from the humming window unit with nothing but my own crossed arms? She doesn’t, and I give a hard yank.

  I don’t know what woke me up. I never do. I imagine the day will soon come when I’ll open my eyes to see Douglas standing beside me, staring at me. At which time I’ll probably shit the bed. Crap, I said shit. Even when I say it in my head, I feel judged by my highly evolved wife and smarter people everywhere. I’m so uncivilized. I should be sleeping on the beach beside a fire, my home a hollowed-out whale carcass or something. I’m a savage, and I have a savage’s potty-mouth mind. I better clean up my act soon, or Douglas is gonna start repeating my words at the most inopportune times—which will naturally lead to divorce. I don’t want a divorce. Oh well, it’s 3 a.m. I have better things to think about.

  Before I close my eyes again, I can see a bird standing in front of the other window—the one the A/C isn’t installed in. The street lamp makes it a dark silhouette, and it casts a partial shadow into our room and across the bed.

  Damn bird. I touch my chest. It still hurts.

  I drift to sleep. Doug will be waking up at about 5:30. He always does. I don’t understand it. I suppose at two, he thinks the world is worth waking up for every day. Obviously he hasn’t been watching the news, hasn’t been dumped, fired, or expected to make ends meet in the rat race we call freedom. Uh oh, I’m getting cynical. I have to get some sleep if I’m gonna have the energy to walk him—and by “walk,” I mean “carry” him—to the coffee shop. We’ll catch the sunrise on the beach, watch the dolphins.

  Dolphins. I heard—and then confirmed via an internet search—that dolphins gang rape people. Unbelievable.

  The bird takes off.

  I drift back into sleep.