Just Throw the Ball
I like the old dog best. The golden retriever, rheumaticky and grey-muzzled.
The other dogs are all bark and fizz, but they’re afraid. They race up and down the beach, splashing in the white-tipped surf, then cluster in a yapping pack around whoever is about to throw a tennis ball into the waves.
Most of them don’t move when the ball slaps into the sea, just whimper and bark at the fluorescent yellow orb drifting amid the green waves. One or two paddle a little way out, but when the ocean floor drops off and they glimpse me in the deep blackness, they turn back.
The owners aren’t happy. “Go on,” they shout. “Fetch the ball!” and they toss pebbles in a line — plop, plop, plop — trying to guide their dogs to the ball that rises and falls with the swell.
The dogs aren’t having any of it. Not once they know I’m down here. They’re out of the water with a quick shake, then race into the safety of the dunes.
Not the old dog, though. The grey-flecked, limping dog. He’s at the water’s edge, focused on the ball, panting.
“Go on, then,” says his master with a laugh.
The old dog lunges into the surf, battles it, finds his rhythm and he’s off. No rheumatics now. The water buoys him; hugs him, even. A chilly, frothy embrace.
He’s a real torpedo, and when the water deepens, and he senses me billowing black beneath him, he doesn’t even pause. He keeps right on going, gaze glued to the ball.
The other owners look on admiringly, and say to his master, “A real goer, isn’t he.”
They’re jealous, of course. Not just that the old dog is so much braver than their own, so much more alive. They’re jealous for themselves, although maybe they don’t yet realize it. They sense what they’ve all lost: courage, a willingness to live without fear of consequences, a willingness to live without constantly grasping for more life.
The memory’s still deep inside them, I think. That’s why they come to the cramped public beach instead of the spacious parks inland. They feel the pull of the ocean, its vastness and mystery. Some part of them remembers the old-timers who went to sea in sailing ships. No guarantees for them, no promise of a return journey.
But they knew what it is to live; they knew the mystery of life, the mystery of the ocean. They knew me.
Kraken, Cetus, Charybdis, Hydra. An endless list of names for the monster that appears amid the gale-blown waves, for the monster that reaches out and crushes sailor and ship. An endless list of names for the mystery and keen, bright edge of life.
No one knows me now. No one sees me. They’re not even capable of seeing me anymore. I could arise before those dog walkers on the beach, water streaming off my limbs and flanks, blotting out the sky. I could level inland forests with my roar and strip the beach of sand. I could scoop them all up in a single bite, and if, by chance, an onlooker captured the sight on a cell phone and transmitted the image virally across their electronic web, still no one would believe.
“Strange Natural Phenomenon Strikes Remote Beach” the headlines would proclaim, or: “Scientists Speculate about Existence of Huge Ichthyosaur.”
They’d want to explain me away all neat and scientific-like.
That old dog understands more than they. Its beast-mind knows me marrow and bone, tooth and claw, yet still it swims through my domain, still its ancient bloodlust drives it, unafraid, toward a silly, yellow ball.
It’s back on the beach now, the ball dropped at its master’s feet, barking and barking, the life within it pleading over and over: “Just throw the ball!”
But its master pockets the ball and turns to leave with his companions. A squall approaches, grey and misty and soaking. They all return to the safety of their cars, the old dog limping after them. Not one has the courage to wait for the squall to sweep ashore and lay down a blanket of swirling mist. Not one has the curiosity or intuition to stare into the wall of grey and await my arrival, a darkening shape in the fading light. They are all unimaginative cowards.
All save one who arrives while the others leave. I’ve seen her before.
The men wave to her as they depart, then snigger behind her back. “Silly old bat,” I hear them say.
She wears a rainbow of mismatched clothes; drives a car patchworked with stickers for every social cause of the past twenty years. She sometimes stands up on the bluff, arms wide, and greets the new day. She is open, and that is all I need.
Stripping out of pants and jacket, donning a tight, rubber swimming cap, she steps boldly into the chilling waves, rubs her body with her hands, then dives beneath the breakers.
She breaches like a fragile, pallid whale, gasps for air and strikes out, paddling steadily into the ocean now veiled in fog. She swims to where the ocean bed drops off, to where I wait in the black depths, and still she swims on.
I draw her under, under the heave and slop of the froth-tinged waves. Draw her gently into the throat of a slowly-turning whirlpool. She must not be afraid. She must know that a few kicks will bring her safe to the surface. I only want a moment of her time: an instant of receptivity.
She sees me now and her eyes are wide, trying to blink away the seawater. And I blink in return, lest she think I’m only a passing bed of kelp. I blink and snag her leg with the smallest of my claws, and the sharpest. The tiniest nick and a fragment of my ancient bone beneath her skin; a wound that will never quite heal and will ache the farther she travels from the ocean.
I release her from my whirlpool grip, from the snag of my claw, and buoy her to the surface where she gasps, and coughs — and then I wait with such earnest hope: yes, she smiles.
My limbs pulse and the sea surge carries her landward and eases her onto the soft, sand beach. She will return home now, exhausted and exhilarated, a fragment of me within her, and when she sleeps I will know if, deep, deep down, her kind still remembers me and what I gave them.
I will know her dreams, and she will know mine.
To read more stories from December’s Dark & Holy Fiction Challenge visit and follow The Mad River and 13 Days Pub.
