Mel

Mel sat near the edge of the cliff behind her house, crying.  Her arms crossed over the scrap book, clutching its corners to her shoulders.  It was midsummer; the grass around her grew thick and green and the air roared when the ocean met the cliff.

A tear fell from her hung head and scared an ant from its flower.  Her swollen eyes followed the little black body until it disappeared under the grassy canopy.  A moment later, it reappeared on the stalk of a dandelion.



Mel’s palms began to hurt from gripping the book so tightly, so she lay it in her lap, tracing its edges.  She willed herself to take in the thick air, filling her lungs before opening the book.  What she saw did not surprise her.  Of course it would be this page; it always was, no matter where she opened it from, and it had been that way for a year now.  It was the picture of her and Justin at last year’s fair. 



“We got burnt pretty good, didn’t we?”  said Justin, his voice nearly a whisper riding on the crashing waves.

A smile began to form at the corner of her mouth, but she didn’t look away from the photograph.  They did get some sun that day.  Justin’s cheeks were pink and his freckles were coming in just beneath his eyes.  “It looks good on you, though,” she said, “I wish I cleaned up before this.”  She circled her finger around her sweaty hair.



“You were beautiful.  You are beautiful.” 



Her head sunk and her mouth twisted as she tried to hold back her sobs.



“I’m sorry…” Justin said.



“D-don’t be,” she sniffled, “you…you left because you weren’t happy.” 



There was no response; only the clapping of the water and stone met her ears.



The ant moved up the dandelion stalk a couple inches, then stopped.  Her eyes went back to the photograph and took in each minute detail: their table of necklaces for sale, their sleeping bags and containers of beach glass in the background, and the necklace she was wearing.



Mel remembered the weight of her necklace and grasped it between her thumb and index finger.  She could feel the fraying cord where Justin made a mistake and the blue chunk of beach glass—the necklace’s centerpiece.  The camera’s flash filled the centerpiece with a white glow and Mel pulled on it until it rested between her pronounced collar bones.  It was the last necklace Justin made for her. 



Mel closed her eyes and filled her mind with the ocean’s rhythm.  Waves foamed in her skull, curling against her eardrum before rising, recoiling, then crushing behind her eyes.  A cool wind spun in her throat, rising over the spitting ocean of her mind, stinging, numbing before another tide hurled itself.  Her shut eyes stung as the roiling sea leaked from them, dripping onto the photograph.



Mel reached for the back of her neck and pinched the loop of her necklace away from the wooden bead.  The line of glass and string pulled across her and dangled over the book.



“That one’s my favorite,” said Justin.



With eyes still shut, Mel returned.  “Mine, too.”



“You don’t want it anymore,” he said between the tide.



She started to reply but choked on the words.  They spiraled in the whirlpool in her mind, dissolving, running down her cheeks until she forced out all she could.  “I want you back.”



An icy wind struck Mel and she opened her eyes.  She didn’t feel the sun on her face.  She didn’t smell the budding lilies.  She didn’t hear the pine needles whispering in the wind.  She felt like she was wearing another layer of skin; she smelled the soil and gas from her property; she heard the hollow heart of the woods.  There was no sun, no flowers, no beautiful sound.  There was none of that because it wasn’t summer at all. 



She glanced around.  The pine branched stilled and hung.  The golden sun liquidated and faded to gray behind a haze of motionless clouds.  The green around her turned to brown and shrunk into the earth.



She wanted to force her eyes shut but couldn’t.  Instead, they set on the dandelion standing alone in the wilted, brown grass.  The ant was motionless.



A cloud shadowed everything and the ocean whipped against the cliff.  A gust of wind pushed the dandelion, shaking the ant from the stalk over the cliff.  The yellow petals folded into each other and the green stalk paled and shrunk into the soil just as the grass had.  When it lost all color, the shrinking slowed until it became a white arch in dead grass. 



When she looked to Justin, his expression was frozen into a blank stare towards the ground, his neck elongated and hung.  The color in his skin turned to stone gray then white, his lips blue.  The thick imprints of a rope settled into his neck, brown and bruised in a ring.  The bruised flesh moistened beneath the back of his hair and began trickling under his chin.  The color in his clothes darkened as if they had been in a rainstorm and his blank, lifeless eyes pooled with water until they overflowed and became small oceans of their own. 



Mel looked away and commanded her legs to the edge of the cliff where she held the book and necklace, outstretched to the waves and rocks.  She looked down and could still see part of the noose pushed into a soaked crevice.  Just before her fingers released, she heard Justin’s voice trickling into the mud behind her.



“I’ll miss you, too,” she whispered, “I’m sorry.”  And after a year, the ocean once more claimed her boyfriend.