salt red
The sight of her seashell ears washed through me like the taste of summer fruit: peaches,
ripe for the plucking, their soft fuzz dewed with tiny pearls; or bursting cherries flooding the
mouth with sweet-tart juice. The sand was butter soft under my feet as I walked down the
beach, the waves grey and glinting, nibbling on the shoreline with ferocious foaming teeth.
She was further away now, and I sped to catch up. Not running, exactly, but marching
briskly forward to close the distance between us. She sped up too, with a backwards glance
that thrilled me as though my fingertips had brushed fresh lightning.
The air was salt from sea-spray and the wind tanged like seaweed. The red of her
swimsuit was salt, too, like rare meat over ginger cream flesh.
The sand muffled my footsteps as I padded over, steadily, surely, still not quite
running. It was grainy beneath me; my feet sent little puffs of sand bursting out behind me,
scattering tiny red-eyed crabs back into their silica tunnels.
The girl turned sharply, up the ramp and into the grey-green scrub, up and onto
diamond-glinted gravel, her picnic basket under one arm and streaks of sand down her calves
like icing sugar. The sky rumbled.
There were rows of brick and wooden houses lining the beach scrub, all salt-dusted
with wrinkled corrugated iron rooves that sang out as the rain began to fall, soft, bursting
drops that drenched in seconds.
The girl hurried on, and I followed, the tarmac steaming under my bare feet, nails
scritching on the pavement.
She turned into a house about halfway down the street; a white fibro shack with its
roof painted blue-green like crocodile skin, like the