HANGING OUT

The view from the viewing platform is underwhelming. Least of all because the coin-op binoculars seem to have plummeted 30 feet onto the beach below.

You stand with your palms pressing into the crumbling wood-and-steel pillar that once held it up, pulp too wet to be giving you any meaningful splinters. The ocean stretches as far as your useless eyes can see, overcast sky turned blown-out white by glare. You can only just make out the horizon.

Still. You stare.

Digging your nails into the rotten wood over and over again you try to occupy your mind with something. Anything to overpower the pit in your stomach.

It's not really working, if you're honest.

Finally, you look away. Even if only because your eyes are starting to water from the light. Looking down at the platform, you squeeze the damp pillar harder, orphaned steel bolts beneath your fingertips. Fuck, you forgot how scary it is to look down.

You try and focus your eyes on the fishing crates down on the shore. The nets sit lazily half-in half-out, thrown in at the end of the day. You haven't seen who works with them yet, not in all the time you've been here.
You don't think you really care who sees you now, just so long as they don't know you. Just so long as they don't bring anything up.

… Clearly you’re too tense, as one of the metal bolts that used to secure the binoculars to this post comes off in your hand, nut included.

Shakily, you take five square paces back. You don't look away from the crates as they disappear from view. Not until you feel your shoes on the grass again.

You might be flirting with the height here, but not so much as to want to stand on such … fickle ground.


You squeeze the metal in your hand, palms damp from the sea air. Finally, you turn your head away from the cliff. Now what?


A weeping willow, the biggest tree in this whole town, is just a few feet away. Pretty as it is, you’ve never paid it much mind. From the side where you tend to look, it primarily serves to obscure that platform, a far more interesting feature of this cliff.

Still. It stands alone, and clearly stood long before every tree in the forest behind the house.

Approaching it, away from the cliff’s edge, you begin to wonder. It seems strange that it is alone on such a thin strip of land between road and open air. Was it always the only one here?

You rest your forehead up against it, feeling pretty stupid to be empathising with a made up backstory for a tree, and yet still you grit your teeth.

Exhaling a miserable sound, you knock your head against it a few times. Not hard enough to hurt, but enough to shake your brain around a little. Your eyes squeeze even further shut, bark scraping against your tensing forehead. The rumbling between your ears drowns out the ocean, the gentle rustling of the leaves turning dry.


Hand on the tree’s trunk, you slide down into a crouch. Raised, uneven ground obscures you. And you sit there for a minute, two. It’s all you can do to fiddle with the cold steel in your hands. Though, you aren’t strong enough to twist them apart.


Still. You knock your head against the tree again, throwing your neck backwards alongside a bout of clenching and unclenching your fists around each other, twisting your fingers. Your teeth grit. You really hope nobody can see you. You’re full of a restless energy and you just wish it would stop.

“Hello!”

You let loose a frightened noise, feet scrambling to push you slightly more upright. Head whipping around to the source, you briefly blind yourself on the cloud-covered sun.

“It’s weird seeing you here!” The voice continues, and you recognize them now. Blinking your vision clear again, it’s Lupus.

You open your mouth to speak, though expect her to continue before you manage to formulate anything coherent…


… But she doesn’t. You lean half-crouched against the tree, slack-jawed for a little while– Lupus looking at you expectantly.

“Um.” Is all you can say.

…

“I mean. I only live a little bit away.”

She tilts her head at you as you continue to tentatively rise up to full height, and she gestures.
“No, I mean, in the play area.”

You feel your face scrunch into a confused shape at the wording. Play area?

It prompts you to look about at your surroundings, craning around both sides of the tree and for a moment, stepping on your tip-toes. Besides the tree, there is just alongside it, the upturned boat you had ducked into a few days back with your concussion… Is that what she means?

The vessel, as you had seen it before, is still cleaved in twain. Like the Titanic, kinda; split down the middle as if snapped. Making it thus, a kind of den. Not unlike a twig hut or side-turned cardboard box.

It has some, well, is the word toys? Sport balls, plastic shovels, badminton racquets… They’re strewn about around and outside it… And peeking in through some of the gaps you can see some more traditional playthings. A rubiks’ cube for one, and plastic figures of varied shapes for two.



Ah, have you just wandered onto the children’s play area and had a mental break on it? Cool. Cool cool cool.



“Oh!” You say, trying not to let the screaming embarrassment appear too obvious. “I can’t think I’ve seen many kids around here? Is this where they play?”

“Yeah! And everyone else if they want to!”
She’s enthusiastic, the same way she always seems to be. From what little you’ve seen of her, you mean.

You used to know someone who was just as unrelentingly positive as this.
–Perhaps an understatement… You literally shared a third of a brain with them for the longest time– and while you can’t say you ever knew exactly what they were thinking… You know it wasn’t all positive in there all the time.

Far from it, honestly.

You wonder if she’s the same.

“What do you mean?” A basic followup question is begged.

“I mean anyone can play here!” She restates what she said prior just in different words. “Do you want to?”

“Uhhhh…” You don’t know how to respond to this. “I… Don’t know what I’d play?”
Even though you speak it as a question, it’s more of a confused placeholder.

“We could just play pretend.” Lupus shrugs, wide eyed enthusiasm never letting up as she implicates you.

Then, expecting that you follow, she wanders just a second to your right and ducks under the ship’s hull. So taken aback by her straightforwardness, you do indeed follow after.


Inside, this structure requires you crouch or squat. It’s maybe two thirds your standing height. When you were in here before, you were practically on your hands and knees already, so it didn’t seem like much of a hassle… But now you pay more attention.


There’s some ancient, crusty picnic blankets on the ground to keep it from being raw earth, and ramshackle shelves made from palettes and boxes that make the space inside even more cramped.
Still, it’s a passenger boat. At one time, you’d assume this was merely floor one of several. Lengths and width-ways, you could probably cram ten kids in here… Though you think with you and Lupus being the size that you are, you wouldn’t want more than a third adult here with you.

It’s relatively bright, given the myriad seams and seemingly intentional punched-out planks. You can see a genuine archaeological record of childish doodles on every surface. Crayon, paint, even ballpoint pen. You… try and match a few up to people you know here.

But, before you can ask how old this thing is, Lupus interrupts you with a question.

“So. What do you want to play?”


You shake your head and let yourself sit down in the same corner you sat in last time.
“I don’t know. I don’t know if I can just…” Gesturing an arm in the air, long sleeve trailing behind it, you try to word something. “Play. Like, unfettered and without rules.”

She slumps back with her arms folded, and finally her bright expression blinks into the mildest of furrowed brows. Her eyes are only now, no longer locked with yours.
“Mmhhh.” Lupus grunts. “Well it was worth a shot. It’s kinda sad that it stops being so natural at some point, isn’t it?”

Your throat crackles with an ‘ah’ before it turns into a sorry: “Yeah.”

She looks you in the eye again. “But I distracted you for a little bit, right?”

You nod. “I’m guessing you could tell I was feeling, uh, weird. Thanks. I think I’m less, weird, now.”

She is so strange to you. You just cannot get a read on her– even now her tail isn’t still.
While it has slowed considerably from its usual speed, it still wags against the ground.

You don’t get the impression the positivity is at all an act. Which is impressive.
Almost letting out a chuckle at your internal awe, she doesn’t give you time to.

“But you’re still sad.”

Huh?

“I guess?”

Are you? This feels like the regular level of melancholy you’re used to, if anything. Far calmer than your teeth-grinding tension from just a few minutes prior.

You mean. Like you said. You guess. You guess you’re not exactly happy. But, neutral is normal.

In the silence, your eyes wander through the space in search of anything notable. Those little figures you saw from outside, perhaps…? The colour of the ship’s wood makes you wonder if it had been painted, because you aren’t sure what else could make it such a strange rusty red.

The toys sit strewn on a thus contrasting pale wooden crate, some fallen through the missing slats. You don’t think you recognise any, even if the quadrupeds seem a little pony-like. Another few seem to be nestled in the dirt by the ship’s bow. Stood upright, but with feet buried in the soil. You let your eyes rest there, and pinch the skin between your thumb and forefinger, rubbing it back and forth as you do.

“Lavender says you want to tell stories when you grow up.”

She distracts you again.

The wording confuses you a little, and you see distinctly the hope in her face. It’s tinged with pity, but not in a way that you resent. If anything, it warms you.

Grow up… You suppose you aren’t, yet. You don’t know how that makes you feel, but…

“She said that?” The idea that you exist in their heads outside of your immediate existence rattles you a little. Good and bad. Grown and immutable, or not.

“Well, she said a lot of things.” Light filters through the loose wooden slats behind her, making her hard to see when she moves. “She said you were a writer, and an actor, and a poet, and other stuff too. But all of those are about stories, right?”

The sun beams through behind her, grey sky blue.

Storyteller. You like that.
And you nod.

Still, she waits for a bolder response.

“Yes.” You say. Simple. “That’s it.”

“Then tell a story! Any!”


You inhale, musty air feeling almost fresh from invigoration. With your lungs full and chest high, all of the disjointed thoughts you’ve been juggling are flattened by the request.

Any.

Not necessarily your own, even. Just Any.


And you’ve been dying to talk about this one. With anyone. From even before you came here. It’s about a ship, even.
Finally, you exhale your held breath, and with it, you begin.

“All the other Greeks who had survived the brutal sack of Troy sailed safely home to their own wives—except this man alone.”