Walking the Beach

This is a little story inspired by a writing prompt I did with my writing group. It is a fun slice of fictional narrative that is a bit meta - a writer writing about a writer and writing. Enjoy!

    It’s cold out, the wind whipping the ocean into a frenzy. Still, Daisy needs walking and I best do it before the sun slips down the horizon and the daylight is gone. I shove my feet into my rubber boots, feeling like a failure. I shrug into my jacket and we’re off, my dog full of the enthusiasm I lack. I was supposed to be writing today. Spinning my imagination into gold.

     I sat at my desk for nearly an hour, staring out at the choppy grey waves waiting for inspiration. I folded laundry. Wrote two hundred words, deleted them, started again. I swept the floor. Wrote fifty more. Deleted. I sat on the third to bottom step and counted my losses: my father, my best friend, my favorite sweater, a five-dollar bill, my sense of humor.

     I’m not sure where it has gone -- the idea I worked out last night when I was supposed to be sleeping. Something about a one-legged clown falling in love with a totem-pole carver. The one-legged clown wiping off his make up. The carver glistening, wood chips collecting in her long black hair.

    It was good, really. Brilliant even. The setting evocative: a Ferris wheel being built, a dust storm in the desert, the taste of salt in the air.

     On the beach, the dog bounds ahead, crashing into the waves and then jumping back again as if the novelty of the ocean surprises her. Ecstasy. Ah, to be a dog. The wind is biting and I’m waking up from my fugue state, my word-rich coma. My clown. I’ll name him Circuit. He will fry eggs with his electric fingers.

     I find a suitable stick and throw it for Daisy. She bounds after it, into the crashing surf. Happier than a moment ago, if possible. We play this back and forth game until finally she loses interest. We continue along the beach. She starts digging. At first, I don’t notice because I’m naming the totem-carver. Aleka . . . it means “she who makes the wood speak.”

     I’ve kept walking and Daisy’s not catching up. She’s nosing something frantically. Paws working the sand, inhaling in greedy breaths. I make my way to her and kneel. Something metal, rusty. I brush away the sand. It’s a box, metal, with blooms of rust decorating the top, the corners are sharp. There is a looped clasp, no lock.

     I unclasp the latch. Inside there’s a book. Perfectly preserved as though that rusty box is waterproof. On the cover there is clown in white face. The title of the book is titled “Circuit.” I turn the book over. A tragic love story between a one-legged clown and a totem pole carver, set in the desert during a sand-storm.

    Daisy and I walk on, toward the middle distance, where I see them erecting a Ferris wheel on the board walk, the taste of salt in the air.