The Sea Ain't Mine Alone by C.L. Beaumont

She’d search until she found his little pale blue swimming shorts and set them on the bed for him to find as a surprise when he woke up to the clanging of his Bugs Bunny alarm clock-the promise of a full Saturday’s worth of daylight spent waist-deep in salt water and sand. And James would pretend to be asleep while she rummaged through the hamper of their clothes, all fresh and dry from the laundry line in the sun. She’d step out of her mint green Baby Doll shoes, her pink and white frilled waitress cap still bobby pinned to her curls, and press a kiss to his salt-free forehead, drowning out the sound of the waves. She always called him a crusty old shrimp when she was happy-when her Friday night date after her shift at Lou’s Diner went well, and she came home to James already tucked in his bed with the bowl from his cornflakes washed and drying in the sink. Cotton balls stuck between her freshly painted coral toenails, hairnet over curlers, and a languishing Lucky Strike perched between her fingers. “You crusty old shrimp.” She had a warm smile on her lips and one hip propped against the metal doorframe of their little red and white seaside mobile home. “Jesus, stop licking your skin, Jimmy,” his mom said to him. That dried and slithered in shrinking flakes across the skin of his forearms under the baking sun. That whipped through the valleys of his pruny fingertips and nestled thickly in the thin hair on his arms, the tiny crevices of his big toe nails, the hidden curve just behind his ear.

Salt that crackled across his tongue and burned in the corners of his tear ducts.

The kind that coated shivering skin in chalky warmth and crusted like splintering glass in between tiny strands of hair, seeking the water, seeking the sun, seeking the froth. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and not intended by the author. Published 2019 by Carnation Jose, CA, USAĬover design © 2019 Lodestar Author Services

The Sea Ain't Mine Alone by C.L. Beaumont