Dawn came and the sun congealed about the horizon, its image looming across creases in the water as it rose. Diminutive boats with trailing oars and nets snailed across the cove. They orbited each other like a bedraggled mobile of the cosmos and their shadows dragged like blue blood in their wake.
The beach shone and the sand strobed between the trees that scattered the shoreline. The trees with silhouettes flat as card and black as tar: the same trees white at night from the afterglow of the neighbouring suburbia. In the distance, a table of stone poked through the water looking like an altar of some sunken civilisation. Further still a figure swam as hard as it could away from the land and out into open ocean.
A man stood in front of his open car boot facing it all, its bonnet coughing a halo of smoke around both he and the car.
A stray dog slunk around him and at the hem of the waves. Sniffing at some green matter the ocean had cast aside it looked towards the man. He had a jagged shape with a hard outline: a coarse iteration of the weathered stud that stood beside a toned barbie, both peeling from the side of a vacant surf kiosk. He swept some hair from his face and folded a slug of tobacco into a cigarette. Lastly he looked back at the dog.
The dog faltered on the shore and then pointed his snout to the tangle of debris once more. The man drew closer and the dog scudded into the waves and out again only to lope off, followed by its bounding shadow, warped comically by the runnels in the sand.
The man strode purposely toward where the dog had begun its chaotic amble: a self-appointed suzerain of a land yet to be reclaimed by its swathes of sunbathing holiday makers and their blood oath with Lethargy. They would come to scorch away memories of past lives and reincarnate themselves temporarily and keep a record of every second.
The beach was very quiet; the man too. He seemed at odds with the world but not at odds with he as a man within it. As if to underscore this theatrical notion he lit his cigarette.
His assured gait belied a vague unease, yet he wished to inspect the dog’s discovery all the same. His unease had not been brought to him by the dog or by the mystery of its find at the water’s edge. It was there all about him. It was on the beach but it had followed him from right at the very beginning.
He reached where the dog had been moments before and stood there. Looking about him, it was clear that no one but he and the dog walked the beach that morning.
Amidst the weave of gunk and plastic and the intermittent, lapping surf a human skull winked up at him, bleached porcelain from the salt and clattering stones and fish. The skull’s wink was quite literal; in one socket a shell rotated as the carapace of some sea creature sought to remove itself from the man’s gaze.
He watched until the surf reclaimed the skull and the white car smoke billowed around him holding the long since extinguished cigarette stub; until he himself appeared ossified and the stretch of beach became muted and low resolution and until he felt as a somnambulist would in the fearful moments after being woken.
He now stood once again at the boot of the car and inspected the block of ice that sat there. Threads of water were being drawn from the block. Its corners wilted and the droplets ticked and clinked from pockets in the car boot like a thousand discordant timepieces hung in a watchmakers. Caught in the middle of its entropy he saw his reflection and watched as it skated queasily, again and again, across the ice.