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Some shade wracked itself together in the gutters. Should there linger a face it would replicate much the same Lucent, though a slice rather than a rectangular disc that Mark felt he could fold beneath an arm and wheel about the roads. They mapped together in a large lagoon of kipper stench and ash dusted against floorboards, and beyond the housing lots was space enough to look with short lashes spread, but not fill with a body. The glass crunched along the tide rifts at the coastline. Green shards could be picked from crevices in the great, slivered cliffrock each morning- but only before dusk lit the sea pale, as then the seagulls had from them interpreted a tasty, if not mildly hazardous breakfast. Now that it was night they lumped together and watched the boats sink. They were methodical; this meant that oftentimes the boats only seemed to sink in a true, sand slumped extent when they watched in that proper angle, the necks elongated and mistaken for white severed arms by unfamiliars and tourists, brought out of the rock’s vast surface like a thousand totems. Mark was quite opposed to the reminder and the mortality laced through the same breath.
The gulls were crueller than the sinkholes that opened up to pull sailors in, the gulls predicted- witnessed and desperate, the grey faces dissolving save for their skeletons. Yet skeletons disappeared again and again and each teeth unique to a gum would never be recovered by mourners. A sea could only be so cruel. Still, the gulls were crueller, and Mark felt, with an odd empathy towards those who grew disgusted by some mounded ease, that he should avoid them. His camera begged for him to stop. Consider how compository the bodies were when they disgraced, and how uniform the forms of the sea were from his stance by the empty strip mall and late to the city, which awaited him, roads emptied for an appropriate distraction, this modesty laid out along the empty cement.
He kept walking. His soles had been deteriorating for days. When they passed above the cigarette stumps or laminated cardboard cartons their state presented only the flaws, and he felt each dot of ash as though it were being fixed to his bare soles. He imagined without obvious end that it would one day fully dress itself in absence, and the plastic streaked down his steps would be a past tense sort of ‘shoe’ once used with passable grace. Or, should he muse rather than just imagine, he could observe the growth of his fame until it was large enough to be sliced in two and then wriggle about surrounded by its own blood, as if a shameful growth that all celebrities treated their status with. His cult would be educated and mature enough to stalk him from time to time, having realised fully his soulful yet calculated approach to photography- and this was a dream his sleep had imprinted against his eyelids. Never would it escape him, and the hope itself was bound to it, therefore to pandora’s velvet.
The seagulls were now shapeless. He glanced although he did not want to, and felt it was nothing more than a horrible nightmare. They spanned an entire sea, now engraved by white feathers and blocked out in their shadows. Perhaps it was an act of mercy, in that they wished to prevent the torture- the view of these sailors, these rough waters greeting infinity with each collapsed lung. Mercy could be noted as rather beautiful in a frame, and Mark had taught himself as such. Mercy was a sight to behold, not a complacent one battered into shape with lenses and filters and editing- though he cherished this too.
One shot. His feet ground against a rubber ring, thin and sallow. His stomach prickled, and he paused once to wretch against the wall which partitioned him from the rock and its bird cut fungus. He could soar from such a vision, and he knew this too, always knowing things, unrecognised scholarly art type Mark Lee, bless his soul until it could soar on this photo-!
In recollection, he could admit that something had come over him, and with instantaneous pleasure his camera was pointed and focused automatically, flash unearthed in its little plastic box, and the lense dilated until it had pulled the vision to its core.
The picture oddly took a moment to load. While it unravelled from the back screen, Mark failed to look away for a mere second, since it seemed as though he was too close to death.
Swarmed by monochrome beaks, there crouched a boy, drowned twice and still alive, his sailor’s uniform disrupting in the wind, his eyes but pitch black dots.