Man on the Beach III

I’ve never been a confident person; it’s just not in my nature. I taught art at an elementary school for a few years after college, but I found it very stressful. My parents had wanted me to go into education but I would have preferred to be an artist rather than an art teacher. I’ve always loved art.

Bill rescued me from teaching. He was my miracle, and he’s always supported my true vocation as an artist. Our plan was to live simply – he’d work while I stayed home and developed my career. But I got pregnant and it wasn’t an easy pregnancy and Stella wasn’t an easy baby.

We decided to finish our family quickly, rather than being burdened for years, so I got pregnant again when Stella was not quite two. We hoped for a boy and we got Michael, plus Michelle, our darling twins. They were good as gold.

When they started kindergarten, I was ready to resume my painting, but that’s when Stella’s childhood difficulties became more severe, and I was kept busy caring for her until she went into sheltered housing when she was 20. And even after that, I was volunteering at the shelter, plus looking after my husband and the twins, who were in university but still living at home. Suddenly it seemed as if I’d gone from looking forward to adulthood when my life would start, to looking forward to retirement for the same reason.

But Bill had a wonderful retirement planned for us. We owned a condo in the Bahamas. After Stella was settled, we used to spend six weeks there every winter and I loved it. The Bahamas aren’t like Mexico – they are very safe and clean, the language is English, you can drink the water and eat the food without worrying. I’d really get into painting when I was there, inspired by the turquoise blue sea, the palm trees, the coral sand.

Somehow our situation changed. I don’t understand finances but I guess some investments went bad and Bill had to sell the condo. He was still insistent on his early retirement in a tropical paradise, but when he chose Belize, I had no idea how terrible it would be.

The day we moved into our beachfront villa, the neighbours were robbed in their house at gunpoint. Believe me, I’ve tried to feel comfortable in this place but I just can’t allow myself to get lost in my art. As long as Bill’s in the house, I’m fine but – as he’s always said – he doesn’t intend to have an indolent retirement.

He dives and he snorkels. I don’t do either of those things, but I stay on the boat while he’s doing it. He opened a little real estate office and no local girl worked out for his receptionist, so I’m happy to put in the same few hours a week that he does.

And now he’s started going up and down the beach with a metal detector. He says it gives him the same thrill that playing the stock market once did. He’s found two Spanish gold coins, but otherwise mostly cheap junk.

I’m with him every step of the way. I’m bored but I just can’t stay by myself in the house. It’s hell.

The Story 365 project is a year-long marathon of short story writing, with a new story for every day of the year and posted on this website from May 1, 2011 – April 30, 2012. Stories must be a minimum of 200 words. Please help me by adding first line or topic suggestions in the Comment section of any story. If you’d like me to use your name in a story, I’d be happy to do that.

Man on the Beach II

My son would not leave his computer and go outside from the time he was six years old. By age 10, he was pasty white and overweight, with top marks in all his subjects at school except phys ed, and no friends at all.

He liked to buy things online, especially second hand things: old electronics, vintage board games, collectable toys. When he told us he’d found a used metal detector that he wanted, his mother and I were happy to foot the bill. I don’t think he realized that he’d have to go outside to use it.

Now, metal detecting is not exactly aerobic, but Jeff at least got some fresh air and sunshine. He met other boys – odd boys like himself, it’s true, but they were friends and they introduced him to different pursuits. Marc got him into paint ball. Haj taught him about competitive kite building and flying. Jeremy got him swimming.

My wife has a phobia about airplanes and for the first 20 years of our marriage, our holidays were always by car and never far from home. But I regretted the loss of the family trips I’d enjoyed as a boy, winter vacations to tropical spots where I could dive in the reefs. I love diving.

When my wife began to take spa weekends with her girlfriends, booking into a downtown hotel for two days of pricy pampering several times a year, I asked her if she’d mind if I took Jeff on a trip to the Turks and Caicos.

Jeff enjoyed diving but you can only dive a couple hours each day, and I could see that he found the rest of the time boring. We were on a remote key with no internet service and he didn’t like the beach – it was either too hot for him or too windy. He wasn’t a big fan of the food, since he doesn’t like fish. I felt certain it was our first and last island holiday together, but he surprised me by asking if I wanted to go again the next year.

I saw why when we unpacked our suitcases at the hotel. Out came his old metal detector.

We’ve had six trips since then and it’s always the same. We dive in the morning. After lunch I set up on a beach chair with a cooler of beer, tunes on the head phones and a good true crime paperback; Jeff covers himself with sun screen and heads on down the beach with his metal detector, a shovel and a little strainer to see what he can find.

It’s perfect.

The Story 365 project is a year-long marathon of short story writing, with a new story for every day of the year and posted on this website from May 1, 2011 – April 30, 2012. Stories must be a minimum of 200 words. Please help me by adding first line or topic suggestions in the Comment section of any story. If you’d like me to use your name in a story, I’d be happy to do that.

The Man on the Beach I

When my husband died, he left his metal detector to Danny. But I don’t think they give him much of a chance to use it at the sheltered living. He’s pretty busy there, going out to his job at MacDonald’s most days, going on shopping trips and to the gym with his worker, attending his classes. He doesn’t have a lot of unstructured time.

They contacted me last year to say that his regular holiday, to a horse ranch with 3 other men from the sheltered living, wasn’t going to happen because they had a staff shortage. In the silence following this announcement, I heard a question. A question I’d never considered before.

And my first impulse was to say no. I hadn’t gone on a holiday at all, since Horace died, and I certainly had no desire to go to a horse ranch. Tropical vacations are more my cup of tea. When I said this, the worker said that a tropical vacation would work as well. My grandson isn’t what they refer to as ‘high maintenance.’ He’s not crazy or dangerous, just more like a strange 9 year old with his obsessions.

When I went to tell Danny about our upcoming trip to Puerto Moreles and showed him the picture of the beach, he became very excited. He’d seen Horace’s beach finds, the gold chains, silver dollars, belt buckles. He’d heard Horace speak often about the possibility of finding pirate treasure.

Of course, I let him bring the metal detector, and it makes the trip so easy for me. I sit by the pool and read my book while he heads down the beach, intent on scanning every inch of sand. It takes him hours to get out of sight, and by then he’s hungry, so he comes back. After lunch, he covers the beach in the opposite direction.

We’ve had four trips now, and I’d never consider going without him. An unexpected bonus has been that he’s found enough valuable stuff to pay for most of his own way, never pirate treasure, but far more jewellery and coins than Horace ever found.

The Story 365 project is a year-long marathon of short story writing, with a new story for every day of the year and posted on this website from May 1, 2011 – April 30, 2012. Stories must be a minimum of 200 words. Please help me by adding first line or topic suggestions in the Comment section of any story. If you’d like me to use your name in a story, I’d be happy to do that.

This story is inspired by someone I saw at Turks and Caicos, where I’m holidaying right now.

The Question

My father asked me to move in with him the other day. He said, “Since your mother died, Simon, the house is too big for me, so I either want to sell it or maybe I can turn the upstairs into an apartment for you.”

Possibly my initial reaction, nothing more than the unguarded expression on my face – surprise tinged with just a touch of horror – wasn’t all that he’d hoped for.

“Hear me out, son. I know you like your things just so in your own place but I think we can renovate to meet your expectations.”

“How are you going to afford this, Dad?”

“Call it your mother’s gift to you. The inheritance she got from Auntie Lil has been sitting in a bank for six years, earning interest.”

“You two were going to use that money for a trip.”

He looked down. There was no need for him to answer. She’d been sick nearly all that time. No use either for me to suggest he spend it on himself. If I didn’t let him spend it on me, he’d give it to my sister. Neither one of us needs it. We’ve both done well. But she has kids so maybe it could be a university fund for them.

I was about to suggest this when he got a strange expression on his face and asked, “You’re not gay, are you, son?”

So – at last – the question had been asked. I’d been expecting it for years. Ever since the questions about when I was going to bring a nice girl home to meet them stopped. Ever since the comments started; comments that didn’t sound like questions even if they were.

“You should see Simon’s apartment, he’s such a good decorator.”

“Most men can’t cook, but Simon knows his way around a kitchen.”

“Simon’s such a good dresser. He has a real sense of style.”

These remarks came mostly from my mother. I think my father was too embarrassed to skate even that close to the terrible possibility. Yet now he’d come right out and asked. I suspect my mother’s death taught him things about love and wasted opportunities.

I hugged him – more unusual behaviour for our family – and said, “No, Dad, I’m not gay. And no, I won’t move in with you. But there’s an apartment available in my building that I think would be perfect for you.”

The Story 365 project is a year-long marathon of short story writing, with a new story for every day of the year and posted on this website from May 1, 2011 – April 30, 2012. Stories must be a minimum of 200 words. Please help me by adding first line or topic suggestions in the Comment section of any story. If you’d like me to use your name in a story, I’d be happy to do that.

This tale is a return to my roots of story-telling, back to the days when my best friend and I used to challenge each other to make up tales about people we saw on the bus or walking downtown. This was inspired by a man I noticed at a bank.

Mars 300

The boys would hike far out into the Martian country, carrying nothing beside light backpacks. The landscape was sere but in every sheltered hollow, air plants grew and a network of creeping vines skeined across the gritty dust, binding it against the wind and slowly converting it to soil, as they’d been designed to do.

“Look at this picture of my grandparents out on a walkabout,” Fox said, showing the other boys a projected image.

“Breathers!” they chuckled.

“Still use them over in Cimmerion,” Fox said.

“They’re Luddite there,” Bear scoffed.

“No, they just want to go back to Earth and be able to breathe the air and stand the heat.”

“So they’re not real Martians. They can’t go out from under the domes.”

“If you want to have a dog, you have to live under a dome,” Shark told them. He was obsessed with dogs.

“No, I heard there were some engineered dogs that escaped up in Bonestell and now they run wild up there. Maybe someday there’ll be enough that we’ll see them around here.”

“That would be neat!”

“Let’s camp now,” Fox said to his friends, each one of them named in the current fashion after extinct animals of Earth.

Bear and Shark shook their flimsy tents until the fabric hardened and switched on the solar heaters while Fox gathered meat bush twigs and water bladders and sweet coco-cherries for their dinner.

Three hundred years since Mars had been settled, the boys lay on sleeping pads beside the heaters and watched the sunset and early twinkling stars and the one steady point of light that few Martians considered to be home. It was minus 30 degrees and the atmosphere was 12 percent oxygen, yet they were perfectly comfortable. The planet had changed greatly, but the men – and boys – who lived there had changed much more.

The Story 365 project is a year-long marathon of short story writing, with a new story for every day of the year and posted on this website from May 1, 2011 – April 30, 2012. Stories must be a minimum of 200 words. Please help me by adding first line or topic suggestions in the Comment section of any story. If you’d like me to use your name in a story, I’d be happy to do that.

This is the final story of Bradbury week, and it’s taken us to the possible future of the settlement of Mars as I’ve imagined it.