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It was Saturday now, the night after the Halloween dance, and like Solis did whenever she felt like being alone, she sat on the beach— just where the water runs up to the sand.
This year they pulled three bodies from the ocean; Solis didn't know how many there were beforehand and she didn't start counting until the end of June.
Too often she keep visiting the places where the bodies washed up. Solis sat on the sand, for what is probably the one hundredth time and listened to the cars rumble overhead. She watched how the water hisses as it licks the shore, and pushed around the sand.
Even though she's sick about drowning, she keeps going back.
Solis kept returning like the dock on the boathouse shore needs her to sit there. Like it won't really look right unless her feet dangle over the salty water. Like maybe those dead people might not have died if she'd been sitting in that very spot.
She climbed up onto a nearby rock and swept away cigarettes left there, letting them fall into the waters below.
Her mother had always smelt like cigarette smoke.
They drift off and Solis watches them, wondering if dead bodies float the same way.
It's dark and everything is small around here, except the buildings on the edge of the sky. The sun buries itself in them every night and rises from the other side of the world, and Solis knows it isn't really circling her but she is sure this town must be the center of something - maybe not the universe, but something close.
The water rushes the shore— high tide, and now the fireflies flashed against the blackness. She shone the flashlight on the stream of water and her little beam of light is caught on a steadily glistening trickle.
Solis sees something in the metallic, in the water's sheen. Maybe not the universe, but something close.
Sitting on the edge of the rock, she lets her muddy boots get soaked with the salt infused water, obnoxiously swinging her feet back and forth slightly splashing the water.
She can hear car tires rolling against the concrete in the parking lot behind her, but Solis didn't glance to see who had pulled up. Probably a bunch of teenagers who wanted to explore the cool "abandoned" boat house again. It wasn't even that dirty or broken down. Why do people keep trespassing?
However a few minutes later she smelt Marlboro cigarettes, the same kind her mom used to smoke, and for a second she thought it could've been her.
"If you're trying to break into the boat house the easiest way to get in is through the-" Solis stopped when she saw her, this was not a group of high schoolers like she originally thought it was. "Oh I'm sorry, I thought you were someone else."
