• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 5060 0

made cities and rivers and canals. The sun rose over their bent backs as they scooped the wet sand. At noon they cooled themselves in the surf and raced back to the hotel. In the afternoons they played in sight of the beach umbrellas, collecting sticks of wood and shells, walking slowly with the little brown boy splashing after them in the ebb tide. Later the adults retired to the hotel and left them alone. Slowly, with the first blue shadows reappearing in the sand, they followed the tide line beyond the dunes and lay down for their most serious pleasure, a burial game. First, with his arm, he made a hollow for her body in the damp sand. She lay in this on her back. He positioned himself at her feet and slowly covered her with sand, her feet, her legs, her belly and small breasts and shoulders and arms. He used wet sand and shaped it in exaggerated projections of her form. Her feet were magnified. Her knees grew round, her thighs were dunes and on her chest he constructed large nippled bosoms. As he worked, her dark eyes never left his face. He lifted her head gently and raised a pillow of sand under it. He lowered her head. From her forehead he built lappets of sand that spread out to her shoulders.

No sooner was the elaborate sculpture completed than she began to destroy it, moving her fingers gently, wiggling her toes. The encrustation slowly crumbled. She raised one knee and then the other, then burst forth altogether and ran down to the water to wash off the crust of sand on her back and the back of her legs. He followed. They bathed in the sea. They held hands and squatted and let the surf break over them. They went back to the beach and now it was his turn to be buried. She built the same elaborate casing for his body. She enlarged the feet, the legs. The small prominence in his bathing suit she built up with cuppings of sand. She built out his narrow chest and widened his shoulders and gave him the lappeted headdress he had designed for her. When the work was done he slowly broke it to pieces, cracking it carefully, as a shell, and breaking out then for the run to the water.

In the evenings, sometimes, their parents took them to the amusements on the boardwalk. They would hear the band concert or see the road show. They saw Around the World in 80 Days. Clouds floated through the theatre. They saw Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. But the real excitement was in the attractions the adults would not dream of patronizing: the freak shows, the penny arcades, the tableaux vivants. They were too shrewd to express their desires. Then after a few visits downtown, when the trip seemed not so formidable, they persuaded the adults they were capable of making it by themselves. And fortified with fifty cents they ran along the boardwalk in the dusk. They stood looking into the lights of the mechanical fortuneteller’s glass case. They put in a penny. The turbaned figure, its mouth clacking open on shining teeth, turned its head right and left and raised its hand in a jerking way; a ticket was extruded and the entire apparatus lurched to a halt in mid-smile. I am the great He-She, the ticket said. They put money in the claw machine, directing it by means of wheels to drop the steel claw where it would clutch the treasure they wanted and release it into the chute. In this way they received a necklace of shells, a small mirror of polished metal, a tiny cat of glass. They viewed the freaks. They walked quietly among the exhibition stalls of the Bearded Lady, the Siamese Twins, the Wild Man from Borneo, the Cardiff Giant, the Alligator Man, the Six-Hundred-Pound Woman. It was this behemoth who stirred on her stool and quivered as the children came before her. She was seized with an irrepressible emotion and rose on her tiny feet and came toward them mountainously. The great gardens of her flesh closed and opened, going out and in, out and in, as she spread her arms in oscillations of sentiment. They moved on. Behind each fence the watchful normal eyes of the creatures tracked their odyssey. From the Giant they bought a ring from his finger