JULIANA MANOVA
SAND
The beach was terrific! Quiet and secluded, not a living soul in sight. Bobby looked around, smiling. Exactly what he needed! A quiet place to get some rest. Most men could only envy the way he influenced women, but he thought it was rather boring. Really awful to have all these crowds of empty-headed beauties, barely dressed mostly, hanging around you, making it impossible for you to go anywhere alone. He wished there was something, anything reasonable to talk about with them, anything that made any sense, but... Of course he had also seen some wonderful girls, but these were the exceptions from the rule. And, when he came across somebody he thought acceptable to have a lasting relation with, it always turned out they had a boyfriend or a husband. Well, he had slept with almost all the girls in town, but... He, too, wished he could find a woman to live with for a time, or even one he could marry - although the idea did not appeal to him that much. All he wanted was a girl who understood him. He was sick of all these looks which seemed to be saying: "What’s he like in bed? He has slept with all the girls around. Why not me? And everybody says he’s terrific." And the nonsensical: "Well, that’s what I thought, too," coupled with an inviting smile. He did not fall for women who would offer themselves. He would rather win them with some effort. He wanted to appeal to them with something different than this Casanova stuff. Worst of all, he had no way whatsoever to get rid of the girls who hung around him all the time. Everywhere. A girl once even got into his hotel room to set a surprise for him in sexy underwear. Well, he could not deny he liked it.
He knew why they liked him so much. His long golden hair was something any girl dreamed of, his eyes, greenish-blue, also seemed to influence them and, in addition, there was his great body - suntanned and weathered because he surfed almost all the time. He adored that sport! And it was welcome for his admirers. When he was riding on the board all the girls on the beach stared at him as if nothing else existed around. Many times they told him how they loved to watch him riding the waves, how masculine he was, how, his muscles tensed, he looked like a panther ready to jump while waiting to catch a wave and keep going for as long as he could. Well, they compared him to many things but he liked most the panther simile. Indeed, the feeling one got when on the board, the sense of the wave power underneath was something that defied description. One had to experience it, live through it! He had no idea what he looked like to the onlookers, but there, on the water, he felt like a god, totally in control, although he knew how easy it was to slip, to balance your body the wrong way in the wrong moment, and lose your life to the roaring power of the ocean which seemed as if waiting for it. But Bobby was not afraid. He was precise in his movement and his expertise was something a lot of the surfers admired. And the girls, of course.
Now he looked around satisfied. The place was simply wonderful. He had managed to get rid of the latest crowd of dumb chicks - he just mounted his bike and roared down the road along the beach. He rarely did that - he had qualms because the fact that women liked him could not be any good reason to hate them, but today he simply could not stand it anymore. He had had enough. He was glad he found this secluded beach. It was surrounded by jagged cliffs, so he doubted anybody had ever come down here before. The only reason he found it was the strong wind which took up his T-shirt and blew it over here while he was settling down to the adjacent, rather unpleasant strip of beach, where there were some couples and one or two loners like himself. There was also a girl, definitely under twenty, who smiled invitingly the moment she saw him dismounting his bike. Then he thought of moving further south, but he knew he’d find even more people there - it was pointless. At least he thought so until he came across this paradise of a beach. The sand was very fine, not so hot now. Only its color poked at his consciousness, reminding him of something he failed to identify. He did not like this sickly yellowish, nothing-definite of a color, but what the hell - the shells here once were like this, and the sand they produced had such a disgusting coloring.
It was between five-thirty and six, the heat of the day had gone. The first thing he was aware of, when he stepped on the sand, was that here he did not feel the wind. Probably because of the cliffs around. The sand-covered space among them was rather small, no more than fifty feet. Nobody would bother him here. He lied on the pleasantly warm sand and closed his eyes. He had been dreaming of this for such a long time! Some rest without the neverending blather of the empty-heads around. Now he could enjoy it in full.
He had no idea for how long he would remain like this. He had no idea whether he hadn’t dozed off at some time. And the sun wasn’t scorching - now you could lie in the pleasant warmth without this burning heat. When he finally decided it was time to go, the sun was about to set. He stood up. His shadow was long, reaching almost to the cliffs that hid the beach from the road. There was something odd about the shadow, however. Bobby looked at it closely. He moved one hand, then the other. The shadow moved, too, but... It seemed to him that it moved somewhat slower. He smiled. What a wild fantasy! They often poked fun at him because of it and of late he was reluctant to voice even the simplest ideas that came to his mind: the sleeping bird camouflaged as his best friend’s wardrobe, waiting for the right moment to flap its wings and fly away; the nice extraterrestrial creature hiding in his parent’s larder, who would never show up, if somebody might see it (Bobby knew it was there all the same); the strange creature of unknown origin his sister ignorantly took for a tablecloth - it was of so many colors and patterns, its very history was woven into it, and his poor sister thought it was just a rather unsightly tablecloth with so many odd, meaningless drawings. He was aware he could not rely on his subconsciousness - it always generated newer illusions. He had learned to ignore it and to avoid talking about it to his friends, because they would definitely think he was going off his mind, but when he was alone, as he was now, he could afford a little indulgence. He waved his hands wildly, and laughed when the shadow repeated the movement. Then his laughter dried up. His hands were now hanging beside his body, and the shadow moved its left hand. It was just a twitch really, but he was positive he saw it. Suddenly the fear overwhelmed him. Come on! His imagination had never played such tricks on him. He could distinguish between fantasy and reality, and the twitch he saw was quite real. He froze in his steps and waited for something else to happen. Only the quite splashing of the waves behind his back was heard in the silence. Bobby wondered what was wrong. Yes. It was the silence - he couldn’t hear any traffic on the road, there were no bird cries. Nothing but the level hum he had been listening to all his life. Normally this would comfort him, but not now. He suddenly wanted it to stop. It felt like something the ocean whispered, in an unknown language, to somebody he couldn’t see... Maybe to his own disobedient shadow, advising it what to do, how to detach itself from him and live a life of its own. It was with him for much too long, gliding over the waves while he was surfing... Now it’s time to do whatever it wanted, enough of him deciding where it should go and what it should do. He shuddered. What would he do without a shadow? Odd... Not that he needed it, but somehow it was a part of him, he could not imagine what it would be like if it wasn’t there. And, they would certainly lock him up somewhere and interrogate him, they would try to find out how it happened, this phenomenon might be reproduced... Not because there might be any use of that, but because human mind would always be tempted by the unknown, the unseen, the impossible.
The shadow moved again. It lifted its right hand - now he saw it as a separate creature - and, it seemed to him, looked at it up and down with its featureless face. He stared and wondered what would happen if he suddenly ran away - would the shadow follow him? Or would it prefer to stay here on this wonderful beach, free at last? He decided to try. He lifted one leg, slowly. The shadow quickly drew up its ghostly limb and stretched it almost to the far end of the beach as if testing its capabilities. Bobby stepped on the sand and realized that the only thing that now linked him to the creature so suddenly alive, was his other leg. He lifted that, too, and the shadow slipped away, without a trace of hesitation. It slid by his side, then up and down the sand, but did not go further than that, did not go over the cliffs to disappear God knows where. Something still kept it here. It changed its size a few times, from a small, noon-time shadow, to a monster of a shadow which one cannot see even at sunset.
Bobby wondered at his own self-control. He knew how most people would react: "Oh my! This is absolutely impossible!!! I can’t believe it! I must be hallucinating! It can’t be anything else. Or dreaming. Yes, it’s one of the two. In fact, this isn’t happening and I’ll wake up in bed shortly and tell everybody what a crazy dream I’ve had. Shadows with lives of their own! Ha! What an insanity! Absolutely impossible!" But most people, of course, did not have his imagination. They lost that together with their childhood, long, long ago. He pinched himself just in case, although he knew in advance what the result would be. He felt the pain. And most certainly failed to make the roaming shadow disappear or, at least, come back and behave properly. Obviously, however, it had had enough and now hung in front of him in its normal, slightly elongated by the sunset shape. It seemed to be peering at him, wondering: "What am I to do with you now, eh? What do I need you for? Twenty two whole years you’ve been making me do things quite different from what I’ve always wanted to do. You think I liked all that surfing? Hell, I hate the ocean! Or going to bed with all those girls? I could have used the time you wasted in such a way for much better purposes!" But in spite of the transformation, the creature could not - would not, Bobby corrected himself - speak.
The two of them stared at each other silently, and after awhile Bobby looked away. He didn’t like the aura of the creature. Then he turned his eyes back down and almost jumped with surprise. For the fraction of the moment he was looking away, the shadow had extended to cover the whole beach, as if there was something huge hanging over, casting such an enormous shadow. Almost against his will Bobby looked up, just in case there was something there. Of course there was nothing. Then, again, he looked down at the sand. He thought he had already seen enough, but he was wrong. The shadow began to sink. It paled, as happens in low light and then it seemed to soak into the sand. In a few seconds it seemed as if nothing at all had happened under the last sun-rays. If he didn’t look down to see that there was nothing there, no shadow at all, he might have though it was a dream. But he looked and there was no shadow, and he was sure it was real. He shook his head deep in thought. Well, he had to go, shadow or not. He started for the cliffs, to climb back up the path he had descended by. Only a couple of steps later the ground shook slightly under his feet and he knew there was more waiting for him. He stood by the cliff-face and waited. Another quake, this time strong enough to pull him down. Somehow he managed to remain erect. Now the grains of sand vibrated madly. A small whirlwind formed, like a miniature sand storm between the rocks. And it felt like a sand storm, with the grit pricking and penetrating everywhere - in his hair, between his teeth, although he kept his mouth firmly closed, in his eyes and ears, everywhere. And it gained in strength, instead of subsiding. The sand began to scratch his skin really painfully, he thought he saw some blood on his hand when he lifted it to protect his eyes. Something made him open his eyes, just the tiniest slits, enough for him to have a look at the beach he thought wonderful until very recently. Now it was like something out of the darkest corners of his wild imagination. And he saw what his former shadow had turned into - something enormous, shapeless emerged from the whirlwind, sucking in all the sand. In fact this was the sand, suddenly alive. And this huge monster stretched out one limb, which the cloud of sand dutifully formed, controlled by somebody else’s will, and caught Bobby around his waist. The flying grains of sand were certainly hurting, but at least they were something you could live with - a couple of scratches here and there and nothing more. Now, however, the sand monster drew him into its core, where all this sand was spinning wildly, destroying everything in its way - no matter was it pebbles ground into powder, or was it flesh removed from the bones of a living, screaming, fighting for his life human being. Bobby felt millions of grains tearing his flesh apart, annihilating his body, destroying perfectly any evidence of his very existence. Some seconds later what was left of him was unrecognizable. But he was still alive. It was inconceivable for him to feel such a pain and be alive. All talk about hell now seemed an appealing alternative and he would pay anything to be there instead of in the middle of this sand storm by the ocean. The grains of no definite color continued to rip pieces of his body and disperse them all around. Bobby had covered his eyes with his hands - or rather, with what had remained of them, when something heavier bumped into his cheek. He opened, for a fraction of a second, his still functioning right eye and saw something he wished he hadn’t seen - it was his right ear, ripped off its place. The moment he saw it, it disintegrated under the relentless attacks of the sand. Then he looked down and found himself flying above the ground, saw that almost nothing had remained of his body. Then he lost a leg, a hand, the other leg. When he saw the remnants of his limbs, the bloody peaces of flesh, the severed tendons, the gristle of his knee, the ripped muscles and the bones protruding out of them, he finally remembered what the sand reminded him of. A moment later the sand finished off with his remaining eye, and never stopped until nothing was left of him, but the fine powder of his bones, which could not be ground any further. Then the whirlwind suddenly stopped. As if God had commanded: "Enough of that! No more!" The particles of sand stopped their motion and just hung in the air until they settled onto the small beach. Nobody would guess that now there was a handful of sand more than yesterday. And, in fact, nobody could come to this place more than once. The secret had to be guarded.
The ocean continued relentlessly, indifferently, impartially to wash the beach. It wasn’t for the first time to witness this - after all, there were only rocks before the first one ever came. Besides, Bobby liked to dominate over the ocean, to ride the waves, while the watery plain certainly disliked people like him. Let it feed on them. As far as it did not touch the creatures of the sea. There were so many people, a hundred or so more or less were of no consequence.
Mira stood up. Her neck was strained from looking at the direction where the guy with the bike disappeared. She had been waiting for him to come back since six o’clock, when he headed for the cliffs. She still hoped she had a chance with him. But it was nine already and she could not spend the night here, on the beach. She would try to find him. After a rather tiring climb up the forbidding rocks, and a couple of scratches and bruises later, she found the place he probably went to. Now it was empty. He’d gone. Perhaps he wanted to avoid her. She was angry. Wasting the whole of three hours waiting for a guy and he disappears like that. What a luck! She did not go down - she could see that was pointless. She tried to calm down. After all, if it wasn’t for him, she would never find this nice secluded place. No one in his right mind would try to climb these disgusting rocks just for the sake of it. Well, she might come back tomorrow. If he came here regularly, she’d be waiting for him. Everything seemed perfect about this place, except... The color of the sand bothered her. She had never seen anything like that before. It reminded her of something. What was it? Of course... it reminded her of dried human bones, left for quite a long time in the open air.
© 2001 Juliana Manova, author
© 2001 Vessela Lutskanova Publishing House
All Rights Reserved!
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