Cloud Moving Hands

A Woman Lies Facedown in the Sand

49 A woman lies facedown in the sand, exhausted. Her family has scattered—the boy plunging a stick down crab holes, the girl sleeping off a string of midnight parties in the backseat of the Jeep. The husband, last seen with his sketchbook, has turned the corner and won’t appear for another hour. Grandmother, nomad in scarves, squats, hunting the beach for shells. A quick sketch of the red dirt island is what the Jeep rental agent drew, a rudimentary map without the fields of rocks, the abandoned pineapple access links gone to rodent and thistle, the rows of tidy plantation houses that would fry but for the Norfolk pines moaning, creaking, keeping the dust down. All her life she had gazed upon the island in ignorance, the faint outline a pale wash on the clearest day, unknowable as something hard and dry. She thought of a friend who loved this island, rode horses through ironwoods and pines, loved fiercely a man who taught her how to use a gun. The likelihood of ghosts as real as the wind. � A Woman Lies Facedown in the Sand 50 Jostled by the Jeep being steered clear of boulders and ruts, she slept. At the cooler elevations, she awoke to climb with the others into a crevice in the trees. The convergence of islands, volcanic shards lifting through sediment of sea and clouds, broke into view. Unmistakable, unmarked, a place from where the soul departs, she leaned at the edge of a jumping-off spot. She felt the collision of entities, the sensation of bones flying, the way a ski jumper pushes vertical to intersect horizontal, gravity pulling the heart as if out of the body. Back in the Jeep, she crumbled under sleep, eyes thrown open as they descended, tossed among the sandwiches, the bottles, the towels, the tanning lotions, and the spare change of clothes they had brought with them. They lurched out of the bush, hit the beach, where a net of stinging flies and biting sand sent the family scrambling to find another resting place. 51 Near shore, kite surfers ride out toward a rust-ridden hull heaved upon the reef, giving the beach its ugly name. She falls facedown into the sand, having dragged her bones to this spot at the end of the road on the red dirt, wind-scoured island. She can’t move out, caught like the barnacled carcass towing a load of cargo unseen. ...