A Land of Ash

BEACH PUPPIES by Daniel Arenson

They sat on the beach, beers in hands, on the night their island ended.

“There goes another one,” Sean whispered, gazing into the sky where a jet plane, headlights cutting through the darkness, airlifted another five hundred refugees to safety. “Seventy-third since we got here.”

Harvey watched his friend. Sean was a small man, rail thin, a man whose round glasses and goatee made him look like a fiery intellectual--an island Trotsky, if you will--but Harvey still remembered him as that scrawny kid the bullies picked on. Sean had always loved numbers, as a child prodigy and now as a professor of number theory, and today he was the only one counting.

In fact, Harvey thought, he was the only one watching at all. He had always been the nervous one, Sean.

Jess and Mike, now, they were your happy couple. Yes, they stretched out on their futons, ran their toes through the sand, and laughed between bottles of beer. Mike had his shirt off, revealing a tattoo of the Cheshire Cat climbing his arm. Jess wore jean shorts and a bikini top, sporting tattoos of ten dark roses, her flower of the night. She punched Mike, who laughed and took another swig of beer. She lit a joint, passed it to him, and their laughter grew.

Looking at them, Harvey thought, you’d never know the fire was coming. Or maybe you would know. Maybe that was exactly how you should look on the night you, your friends, your entire island died.

“Hell,” Jess said and tossed an empty bottle into the waves ahead, those waves whispering in the darkness, only their foamy crests visible in the night. “We gonna die tonight, right? So we die laughing, eh?”

“Damn right!” Mike said, raising a bottle for this Pacific jewel, this dying land. He emptied it, tried to throw it into the water, but hit his foot instead. Jess howled with laughter. Around them puppies scampered, pets abandoned by their owners, those owners airlifted overhead. The pups were happy too, unaware that they were sacrificed to fire; ignorance, like booze, was bliss.

Harvey envied Mike and Jess, as he’d always envied their spirit, their carelessness, their ability to stare the world in the face and tell it to go to hell. They did that now too, just instead of giving the world the finger, they thrust it up at death. For them, life had always been a party. Death was just its final bash.

And there, behind this laughing couple, sat David. He was smiling softly. His hair was long, his face unshaven. Watercolors stained his pants, for David was the artist among them, their seeker of colors and life. He raised his eyes to the full moon, and his smile widened as he saw the birds that fled.

“Doves,” he said. “I haven’t seen doves in so long.”

Yes, for David, this last night was for beauty. In his eyes, he saw only the moonlight on the water, the seashells glinting on the sand, the puppies that played around them.

Harvey envied them all: David, for finding these last glimmers of beauty; Jess and Mike, for being so happy or shallow; Sean, for his intelligence, his perfect understanding of their place in history, the significance of these planes that keep roaring overhead.

Because, Harvey thought, I feel nothing.

“Eighty-four,” Sean whispered, watching from behind those round glasses, and Harvey watched the plane too. It was low enough to see clearly, even in the dark, and Harvey thought of the people inside, the people who’d won the raffle. The people who’d won life.

He looked at his friends. The unfortunate. The lottery losers. The dying.

For the first time that evening, Harvey smiled, because he loved them and even though his insides quivered, he knew there was no better way to die.

He had always held them together, hadn’t he? Not quite their leader, no, but... maybe their glue. Harvey reached into his pocket and felt the paper there. His winning ticket. His plane ticket out. The possibility of life in the remnants of the freezing world.

Harvey closed his eyes. Not without them. He crumbled the paper in his fist, pulled it from his pocket, and tossed it to the water. In the darkness, he couldn’t see it disappear in the ocean. It was better that way.

“One hundred,” Sean soon said, barely audible over the joking and singing of the happy, drunk couple. “I think that’s the last one.”

Harvey took a swig of beer when he noticed that not only planes blotted the stars. A darkness spread in the east, moving fast, like tar spilled across the sky.

“Hey, I heard a good one the other night,” Jess said, bottle in hand. “A rabbi and a priest walk into a bar, and....”

The roar of ash soon drowned out her voice, and Harvey turned his eyes away. He looked at the beach puppies and smiled as the darkness and fire came crashing down.