Cups and Cakes

"Before the sky had finished darkening to navy, the tide had risen to whisk the shell from the atoll, allowing it to continue its progression east. The man’s mind finally blanked as he stared at the slowly passing stars. A meteor flashed across the sky, appearing to slice open the night with the tip of some phalanx of light. The man’s eyes tracked it to the horizon, where it disappeared beyond a plume of smoke. That struck him as odd: a column of smoke, shining white in the rising moon’s light, amidst the waves of a seemingly endless ocean. As the shell approached the smoke, the man recognized it to be steam, not smoke, and realized that this spout of water vapor was a volcano bubbling just beneath the surface. Liquid stone shoved itself forward to the surface, piling among itself and building a new island that animals and plants might someday live on. This realization startled him: the world was changing, growing, perhaps even restarting. The world – the very planet, in and of itself – was forging a new beginning in every moment, in every waking second. The world was healing. The world was moving on from wounds dealt in the past.

It seemed as though infinite peace had tunneled to him through a haze of starvation and released some sort of internal pressure. He felt as though he could finally understand the world, could understand humans, could understand those damned – what had the cheerful one called itself, a Visual Intellect? He felt as though he could never have failed anything prior to this moment. He couldn’t have failed Jessica or Charran or his family or his crew. Not because he was perfect, not because he was lucky, but because nothing up to this point had counted. It was as if his life were some epic tale, and this moment marked the end of its prologue."

[Little did he know: it was, and it did. Well, that last portion is mostly true.]

A Cheery Wave From Stranded Youngsters

The grassy floodplain which sloped gently to the riverbank's drop did stretch as far north as his eyes could see and curved out of sight with the meander of the water at south's eastward drag. He walked with a slight bounce in his step, propelled downward by the furious, eternal tug of gravity to the sobbing tree at the river's edge. She was visible to him, her hair -- so sandy a brown it was almost blonde or so dark a blonde it was almost brunette -- bouncing in loose curls against the breeze's sly wisps, her green sundress tucked neatly within the insides of her knees as she sat with her calves curled up to the left side of her body. Soon enough, he knew, she would hear or sense him and turn to smile as he approached. He would continue on his intercept vector, he would arrive and perhaps sit, he would hold a conversation. He anticipated the moment, could almost envision it like biting into fresh pineapple: that delicious burst of flavor that dulled but slightly throughout and in no amount was too much; his metaphorical teeth would connect, his metaphorical mouth would fill with sweet juices, and his metaphorical taste buds would rejoice in their mutual admiration of the brain's choice in delicacy.

As he neared, she did -- in fact -- turn her head, the drooping branches and thin, yellowing leaves of the willow obstructing her face from his view only slightly. Her eyebrows were perched slightly above their homes, normally contouring the curve of her consummate almond-shaped eyes of hazel; had he startled her? As it had countless times before, the smile crept upon her face, slightly too wide to be proportional. She watched him approach: her body pointed slightly downstream, her face over her shoulder, her right hand propping her up against the grassy loam, her left draped across her knees. He came to within twenty feet of this gorgeous girl and froze, just outside the tall willow's shade.

"Hi," she said casually.

"Hi," he responded, nodding and fumbling with the buttons on his Sunday shirt, kicking the ground lightly with one patent leather shoe's toe.

She moved her head to look upon the river, then returned to face the young man again. "Would you like to...?"

The arrival of her head to its boy-facing position gave her only the view of a teenaged male retreating at full clip up the floodplain in his church clothes. She sighed, crossed her legs, and slumped forward to rest her head on her hands. She would be leaving her grandparents' home for the city soon; summer was almost over; and this boy had spoken only one word to her in the nine weeks she'd spent her afternoons watching the fish leap in the river on Sundays. But, she guessed, that was life.