That a Bird Was Eating
Jake Ruiter
Driving, arms out the window, surfing the boggy air together. Shirtless, the boy looks over and smiles at his father, eyes squinted against the highway blasts of wind that carve his dirty blond hair. A sudden urge to sway the Jeep back and forth in rhythm with his son’s surfing hand, in the rhythm of everything.
The beach, a magnesium-lit kingdom that sears through the haze in the father’s head. A fluorescent-orange disc dips and rises, suspending time, and then it is clasped two-handed by the boy. He twists, winding up the force in his small body to return it to his father. The throw is high, catching the wind and sailing upwards until it stalls and then dives seaward. The father is running now, his joints loosening, his head finally beginning to clear. His feet touch water and he springs himself forward, arms out for the catch, to save the throw, this small, pointless victory.
Fishing rods upright like radio antennas, nestled in white PVC pipes driven into sand. The lines run out expectantly, piercing each cresting wave. A sun canopy to shield them. Lunch. Cheese and crackers and pepperoni, bagged carrots, grapes. The boy purses his lips around the grapes and then shears them in half between his front teeth. The father finishes another beer. They lay back on the puffy beach blanket. They have to lay here and watch the rods. In a moment, the father begins to snore softly. The boy squints at the pin-points of sun through the canopy, using his thumb to cover them and then reveal them again.
They share a dream as always. It is the father’s dream, but they share it. It makes no sense. First, there is a man in a suit with a pet stork, huge, white, towering on his shoulder where a parrot should be. Then confused scenes of heated argument between blurred people that only the father recognizes. Then a fish, a huge striper, decomposing on the beach. The flies crowd its eyes and mouth. Its spinal column is exposed between the remaining curtains of skin and desiccated fish-flesh. The sun suddenly appears from behind a cloud and the long-dead striper jerks its body impossibly, a final twist from head to tail.
The boy wakes first with arms and legs weighted and tingly. The sun still blares its white force outside the protective shade of the canopy. He watches his father sleep, a sunburned, hairy chest that rises and falls with the waves. The dream is already drifting, changing, leaving. There was a fish that a bird was eating and some people were angry about it. The sun sucks it away, bleaches it out like everything. The son looks at his father again. He will snort himself awake. He will crack an eye and see his son and maybe even smile. They will have to reel in the lines. Pack the Jeep. Surf the highway back one more time with all the dread on the other end. Outside the canopy, the waves crash softly, undeterred. The boy lays back and puts his thumb up to his eye once more to see if he can stop the sun from coming in.
Jake Ruiter's work has appeared in Quick Fiction, Wigleaf, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and others. He is still thinking about getting that Black Flag tattoo.
