Short Story Draft

Cream of wheat snow. Cinnamon sand.  The wind is blustery—trying to make me fall on my knees.  I am defiant.  Already the ocean water is a dark gray.  The sky and the water melt into each other.  Snowflakes melt in my eye lashes and skate down my face, collect and lingering a little.

            Behind me is the house Roy and I bought for our retirement.  Its brown siding is a a piece of drift wood among the sand and grass.  He’s still sleeping, warm.  Didn’t even feel me get up and shiver.  Didn’t hear me sigh and slink toward the backdoor which I slid closed, not wanting any snow or cold to seep into the house. 

            The walk from the house to the edge of the beach was treacherous.  The snow melted right through my robe.  Then it just started to settle like a shawl across my shoulders, weighing me down.  Clutching the robe at my chest, I navigate the slick wooden walk in my slippers.  There is no thought to my walk.  Just pure survival.

            The walk ends in sand, a tiny cliff to jump off into hardened sand.  Instead I stand and watch the water, melting all over.  I remember when the sky was this gray in Nevada before a thunderstorm.  When Roy and I would move the couch to the sliding doors and watch the rain splat, spatter and run like my makeup.  Thankfully, now my eyes won’t sting. Roy hasn’t bothered to move the couch to the sliding doors since we moved to New England. 

            “It’s too cold over there.  We’ll get a cold,” his excuse.  Then we’d sit on the couch.  I’d be wrapped in a blanket we both could have shared.

            Roy missed the heat of Nevada.  You could tell by the way he always had the fire lit and the heat on as if the cold were seeping to his bones freezing his marrow. 

            “Come under the blanket,” I would say, “We can make each other warm.”

            Then he’d put the corner over his lap and continue watching TV.  As sweltering as the house got we never shared a blanket unless it was in bed.  Thirty years in the desert.  And now, confronted with cold and water, he is the perpetual iceberg.

            I close my eyes against the wind.  The snow dries as soon as it melts on my cheeks.  I am frigid.  The ocean holds no more interest for me—it is just frothy clay at this point in the storm.  It would be exhilarating to get lost in that deep gray, I think.  Roy must still be asleep.  He always was on one to sleep in on his days off and now, in retirement, it is everyday where he greets the sun hours after I already had breakfast and tea with the sun, enjoying the ocean breeze, discussing the shape of clouds.  He’s lost in his own gray of the morning—this half-light is only more of an excuse to waste in sleep.

            I kick off my slipper into the sand before me and set my barefoot on the wooden walk.  It’s refreshingly cold.  Tightening my grip on the robe, I step off the cliff of the walk and dip my toes into the snowy sand.  Beach sand was never like desert sand.  Here it’s coarse with shell remains and smooth rocks.  Roy would complain and never walk the beach with me.

            “I’ll set my chair up here,” he’d say unfolding his chair at the edge of the walk, “Perfect view of the water and it’s still warm!”  I would look up to him with a slanted head from the sand, toes wiggling, tickled by the sand between them.  With an ever-so-slight shake of the head I’d turn and walk straight to the edge of the water.

            Now I am chattering like Roy on a cold morning before the Sun is out.  I would be up, robe on, sitting at the kitchen counter sipping tea staring at the water and listening.  I always wanted to spend retirement by the sea.  Years in the desert surrounded by sand and no water was depressing.  I longed for the salt and for the razor-sand of my preteen summers.  Before Roy.

            Since May we have been here in the timber-wood-brown house at the top of the shore.  Looking back at it from the water, it is tiny, insignificant.  We haven’t had friends over yet because I’m ashamed of it’s time-share cleanliness.  There is no mess of a home.  It’s like a tidy, sterile death bed.  Lonely.

            Cream of wheat snow.  Cinnamon sand. Like a nice cup of hot chocolate with a lump of whipped cream and some sprinkled cinnamon.  Fancy, but warm.  Roy would like waking up to that.  Then I would stay in the kitchen, looking out the door and enjoying the fact I was inside and warm and loved.  He would be on the couch, watching the news he missed. Doesn’t deserve it.

            I inch into the icy water, wobbling because my chatter has spread from my teeth to my legs and arms as the snow seeps into every thread of my robe.  I stand and wait.