The Outside of August by Joanna Hershon

Author:Joanna Hershon [Hershon, Joanna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307489265
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2003-04-15T04:00:00+00:00

The car bumped and popped along a rocky dirt road. Her head was pounding and all she knew was that she couldn’t drive another minute. She parked among scrub brush, shedding her shoes in the cool sand, and she could hear the ocean long before she saw it. It sounded like screaming, like a crowd going wild. And it looked like the end of the earth. The waves were black and silver and rumbled with the shore. Unlike her home, where the sea was restrained and patient as an old pair of hands, this water was flashy and unrelenting—not allowing for the natural impulse to admire any other surroundings. If you stepped in there was no wading; that seemed perfectly clear. These waves were a date you did not let out of your sight—not unless you were prepared to let her go.

No one would be handing her a blanket. No one but Alice would be seeing that she made good time, that she quit checking up on the sky as if she couldn’t quite believe it was the very same one she’d always known. The sky was one thing. The sea was another—everything paled in contrast to this wild face of the ocean. The waves must have been ten feet overhead and breaking right on shore. Alice knew that if Gus were here he would have to create more chaos; he would not, even for a minute, be able to simply observe.

He had told her, when she’d once asked why he loved to surf, that every time he rode the face of a wave, he felt, for those oddly long seconds, all of life’s expectations and disappointments simply disappear. He’d said it was all a balancing act, this rush of letting go. If he were here, he would reveal himself to her, and then he would turn around and wave before duck-diving under the massive walls of water.

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