03 Sunburn by Laurence Shames

Author:Laurence Shames [Shames, Laurence]
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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Early the next morning, in Key West, Bert d’Ambrosia, wearing a teal-blue suit of weightless Chinese silk, was walking his aged chihuahua on the beach.

Over the Florida Straits, the huge sun was going from orange to yellow as it sliced upward through a wisp of purple cloud; the lightly rippled water was moving from indigo to turquoise on its way to milky green. From moment to moment, the air dried out and warmed, came to feel like day, but underfoot the nubbly coral still held the cool and damp of night: the old man felt the tickling refreshment of it through his sneakers.

He meandered a few yards from the water’s edge, and now he watched discreetly as his tiny dog hunkered down to do its business. These last few days, since flaxseed had become a regular part of its diet, the chihuahua’s approach to the process was almost blase, and Bert, his relief on the dog’s behalf not entirely free of envy, had considered blending a bit of the elixir into his own rations. So far he’d refrained; flaxseed seemed as foreign to his dignity as to his time-honored recipe for meatballs. But as he noted the satisfaction with which Don Giovanni kicked sand and pebbles onto his leavings, as he observed the long-absent lightness in the little creature’s step, he felt himself increasingly tempted. The seeds were simmered in olive oil. How bad could they be?

He strolled up the beach and onto the broad promenade that flanked A1A. As was his custom, he sat down on the seawall and watched the early joggers and the power walkers and the roller bladers. They went by in their lime-green shorts, their headbands that made them look like Indians, their humming skates or fancy shoes with waffle bottoms and reflecting tape. Some of them carried little dumbbells; some had tiny radios strapped around their arms like blood-pressure cuffs. Many of them smiled at Bert or waved. They didn’t know his name; he didn’t know theirs. But for them he was part of the scenery: the old man with the wild shirts and the ancient stiff-legged dog. In his stillness, his predictability, he’d become a feature along their path, like a mailbox or an odd-shaped tree; he took a quiet pleasure from believing that if he was no longer there, some of them would notice, a few would wonder where he was.

He sat there watching, and then one skater caught his eye from perhaps a hundred yards away. He studied her as she approached. She wore a shocking-pink leotard over shiny black bike shorts; she had big boobs that jiggled a bit as she swooped and jerked for balance. Hockey player’s knee pads gave an elephantine aspect to her skinny legs; fingerless gloves let her long red nails poke through. Her ankles turned in like the tires of a car with a broken axle, her eyes were fixed on the hard and lacerating pavement, ferocious concentration made her tongue stick out the corner of her mouth.

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