Burn the Plans by Tyler Jones

Author:Tyler Jones [Jones, Tyler]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cemetery Gates Media
Published: 2022-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

WARLOCK

As a travel writer, people often ask me, “Where is the most beautiful place you’ve ever been?” I always answer the same: beauty is easy to find, peace is much harder. And I want that now more than anything—somewhere peaceful. Somewhere I can sleep. Because I haven’t slept a full night in three years.

Only a few months after my wife died, a magazine asked me to write a feature piece about towns on the Oregon coast. I accepted the assignment just to have something to occupy my mind, and to give my ten-year-old son Colin and I some much-needed time away from the city. So, we packed up our station wagon and drove up the 101 from San Francisco to Gold Beach. After one night there it was on to Port Orford, and then Cape Blanco.

Four days into our journey we arrived in Bandon, Oregon. Three blocks of wood-shingled buildings and shops that sold trinkets make up the old town. One store sold nothing but Christmas decorations all year round. All the tinsel and holly looked grotesque against the weather-beaten wood.

We rented a small cottage near the beach and I took Colin down to the ocean that first day. We wandered through the rocks, found tide pools full of crabs and sea anemones. He clomped around in his rain boots with pictures of robots on them, his too-big coat dipping into the water whenever he’d squat down to take a closer look at something. Wind-blown curls, red cheeks. His bright blue eyes so wide and curious. But there was sadness in those eyes now. He always believed the world was a beautiful piece of machinery, and he wanted to know how it all worked. Then he learned that people sometimes got caught in the machine and ripped apart by the gears.

As I knelt next to my son and explained how the gravity of the moon controlled the tides, I looked into his face and it saddened me that I couldn’t find the boy he’d been before his mom died. That other boy was so playful, always laughing; but someone much more serious had taken his place. Someone tainted by death. I saw Elle in his face, in the way he squinted his eyes when he was thinking. The way he always worried about the poor, the unfortunate, the homeless. Every Christmas we had to convince him to keep the money his grandparents gave him. Keep him from giving it away.

A flash of anger hit me. Anger at Elle for leaving us. Anger at the world for taking her away.

“I read that dolphins might be as smart as humans,” Colin said, without looking up from a small red crab that scuttled away from him.

I reached down and picked up a sand dollar. It fell apart in the palm of my hand.

“They talk to each other,” Colin said. “But we can’t understand them. One book said they even have names for each other.”

I brushed the dust off my hand then hoisted Colin up as a wave rushed in between the rocks, filling the pools with more water.

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