And/Of/Or

VI : mare

mare (n.)
Latin
A sea.

___________________

Max said, "What about cherries?"

Ari blinked into the cold, blank air, stiffening. "What?"

A long silence made Ari wonder if he was hallucinating. Their trail mix was running out. Which meant time. Which meant them. Soon and fast like waiting for the lonely ground to reach out for them. Exhaustion dripped from him like melting wax. 

"When I asked you about what you were writing," Max murmured. "You said cherries."

Ari flexed his fingers. The wax hardened, solidifying around his joints to lock him. "Oh. Yeah."

More silence. More falling. 

"What is it about?" he asked.

Ari once watched a movie about a girl no bigger than a thumb who hated such fact. He used to wonder what was so bad about being small. He used to wonder what was so bad about being less of something to see. There was 196.9 million square feet of earth to worry about. Why worry about more than you must?

He envied the girl now. 196.9 million square feet of earth and this is where he has to be. He felt like the size of at least half of it.

"Nothing," he said, because he had no more reasons to lie. He had no time. "It was a sentence."

"What was the sentence?"

Why? Ari sighed to himself. A bad sentence. A soured, spoiled sentence. A sentence that stripped him naked in gruesome yellow light. A sentence that caught every dent and dip and dune that spoke him in crescendos, in cacophonies. A sentence that struck him where it bled: I have not written in two years. And I do not think I'll ever write again.

But, still.

He recited, "Cherry season has passed, so tell me I've sickened myself enough with them to last until the next."

When Max didn't look, Ari wrote about him. One inch of 196.9 million square feet. That's all he could handle, his words and him.

Perhaps, now that Max knew to look, Ari no longer knew how to write in the endless space.

__________________

The Unheard:

That year's spring came with vendettas.

It was unnaturally warm, bloated with heat and ember air, never discouraged by the sometimes-merciful breezes that floated through. May had suddenly transformed from a slim stranger to a junoesque figure with midday hips that pushed clouds right out of the sky and imposed its curves so insistently on the sun that it had no choice but to retreat from its voluptuous curves right into the safety of the heart of Southern California. April had long fled, taking all its rainy belongings with it with no letter of love left behind. Spring had become summer's uncanny doppelgänger, stripping away any hope for crisp mornings or cool afternoons, mild currents or sweet daytimes. It imposed. It bombarded. It swelled with a summer-adjacent ego. Yes, that was that spring in Southern California.

They'd lived in their house for a year then, the airy noise of South Pasadena a pleasant replacement for their old Los Angeles bustle, their neighborhood full of little families or aging couples or older excitable millennials to keep them interested. The house was a little, stacked thing tucked in the greenery of low-rise hills, walls painted a tired yellow that all the excessive plants tried to hide. It meant much sun. Which was nice except for when the sun got a little too close for comfort.