Eric and I walked the six blocks from the house on 7th street to the rocky beach next to the ferry to Guemes Island. The 7th St. house felt ancient with its fireplace, the clawed feet on the inanimate bathtub, the dumbwaiter that had been converted into a three-story laundry chute. The beach felt archaic as well, decorated with artifacts—smooth shards of pottery and benevolent beach glass—sticky with seaweed latex. It still makes sense to me to throw glass into the ocean. Beautiful trash tempered with time, the gift of littering for future generations. Rub between thumb, index finger, think of me.
This day though, Eric and I discovered a great and mysterious treasure. Mottled brown texture, a gigantic slug buzzing with flies—a body bigger than each of us. Where each of us imagined the slug’s head would be was fiery red flesh, tendrils of bubbly arteries—dripping faucets with impossibly slow yet perceivable leaks. Clearly, we had found something magical and the treasure was ours. Utilizing another beach artifact—the shaft of a broom, rake, mop, something—we devised means to return our prize back to the house on 7th street. The enormous white house, where my family lived, where the feral cat haunted the damp grounds beneath the deck making occasional cameo appearances to remind us that the world was still harsh and dangerous.
The skin was easily punctured as we pushed the sharp, fractured tip of the wooden shaft through the body with grim, yet zealous determination. A slight pop as it gave in to our assault, the wood slid like liquid through the mysterious inside of the prize. Another slight prick of resistance and our treasure was skewered.
Dead weight scraped and tore across rocks and into the parking lot. A shiny iridescent trail sparkled in our wake, perhaps the creature’s proverbial breadcrumb trail in case it was given opportunity to escape. We gripped with white knuckles our respective ends of our skewer, hauling the singular ingredient on our godlike shiskabob. It would not escape. Progress was slow, but we scraped down the blocks, the house appeared in the distance. A car came whooshing past and behind us with a determined velocity. We heard brakes scream like a thousand tiny mice, and the motor sound is a tape rewinding growing louder as it nears us. A crunch of transmission grinding into park, a door opened and slammed, a woman’s voice, “Excuse me! Boys!”
We faced the assailant—we knew she was a thief. Her eyes looked frightened, disturbed. It was clear that our worldviews were clashing. Her sense of adventure had died long ago. She didn’t understand. Her literal mind was muddled with the absorption of factual observation. She could only see two six year-old boys dragging a decapitated seal through residential streets. She made demands and drove along side us as we backtracked, a cruel chaperone. We made plans to return, but Eric was captured by his mother and swept back to where he was kept, the place he slept. A place I will tell you about.
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