my silly words

haunted little PNW town

That summer had passed in a dreamy, thousand-degree haze of cigarettes and overripe nectarines, wasps circling in hypnotic patterns understood only to themselves over abandoned picnics. It presents itself to my impatient memory in shades of bloody sunset reds, brazen fruit-stand yellows, the near-indigo of shallow water under a purple July sky. For years after it happened, this finger-paint haze of vagueries was what passed for recollection. Not recently, though. Not recently.

Things have begun to creep back to me, in halting, sporadic flashes. Objects. Faces. In the dead of night, in my hotel room, words. It was a voice I never thought I'd hear again, breathing forth in the particular creak of a bed spring, the verbal whine of a car's sputtering engine.

The summer trip to this overgrown, backwater pocket of the Pacific Northwest, untouched even by the scads of international tourists that roamed the wine-tasting and coastal resorts with stars in their eyes, had not been my first choice of how to spend an entire month of my school break. My gruff, silent grandfather, deep-sea fisherman by trade and by heart, and nearly Puritan grandmother, who wouldn't take off her wooden cross necklace even when washing clothes by hand or beating the fear of God into fresh market eggs, did not make the most appealing of housemates. I was fully expecting to spend the whole time holed up in the sparse, sun-soaked guest room on the second story, listlessly watching the distant glitter of the seashore through the open window and cutting split ends out of my salt-damaged hair.

For utter lack of things to do, I took to accompanying my grandfather to his day job. Hours, I spent, on the gravelly, seaweed-strewn strips of shore across from the boat launches. Mariners were a strange, anti-social lot, and they threw suspicious glances at me at first, through clouds of viscous, murky smoke that poured from their storybook pipes, but I was harmless. And maybe they began to see the sharp resemblance that hung between my grandfather and me, one that I couldn't see but that I endured comments on constantly. All I did was paint, squinting against the glare across the water, avoiding the pecked-out shells of dead crabs smashed in gory splinters across the smooth tumbled stones. I could never quite wash the smell of boat exhaust and brine out of my hair.

Sometimes I painted what was in front of me, but there's only so many images of the Pacific ocean you have in you. I invented sunsets just to use a little of my red paint. Other times I made things up, whimsical and fanciful pictures in which the perspective was always just a little bit off. And it was around mid-July when I turned 45 degrees to the right to paint the fishermen, and that was when I first noticed him.

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i love spooky coastal towns : ( ( ( it's too bad i don't have the motivation to finish anything