Damage-Brood

I

Let the water come. It will not pass the barriers we have erected. As mandated by the state on the beach which stand with towering solicitude on the sand. Concrete walls. Eric Carter walked to side of his house pressed up against the paint like teenagers pressed against an August. As the beach ceded to the shoreline. And the sand to the shoreline. And the ocean to the shoreline. And the night like the warm hand-of-a-mother wrapped around the fist of her first newborn child . He jumped over the wall dividing the substances and walked to the shore. To not be able to swim in Long Island is an outrageous offence analogous to being told what to do in a warzone except destruction isn’t imminent but an existential condition. Free of any debris he looked clean and white and hard . Simultaneous to this he was watched. She was called Erica. The girl had black bangs cut across her forehead. A blunt was smoked in the dunes covered by the cat-o-nine-tails beach-grass that sometimes wavers. So says the gale-force wind. Another. Katie had the long-blonde hair. Green eyes.

When Eric Carter got out of the water dripping he looked up and saw Katie Flanagan and Erica Rheinholz. These girls were younger than him and he walked towards their amorphous bodies behind the cat-o-nine-tails beach-grass in an indentation in the sand. So sure of himself during the moment of Transfiguration, he did not realize the girls were watching his creeping back from the water after an initial test, his movements analyzed like a sacred animal cornered during ritual sacrifice; then the miraculous charge forward and the plunge.

So these women love the men. Despite it all. Pain. Love. Suffering.
Clenched like barnacles.

To sides of rock.

II

Eric Carter looked at the ocean and wondered why he had been created and Y at this moment he was standing above all else and moving his feet into the water obtaining a moment of Transfiguration where he hoped everything would stop and his fear would rest. He dipped his right big toe in and hopped out. It was cold. The ocean was always cold. He dove. During the Super Bowl the whole place would do the same and Eric wanted to do it too. Train. Gain the respect of a valued social currency. It was not warm like the showers or Jacuzzis he had been in on vacation and at his friend Dick’s house. Katie smoked the last of the blunt and its tip disappeared. She dropped the embers. Erica flashed him a grin and he smiled back. Sent two beers our direction. He was an attractive man but had a girlfriend who he knew loved enough. The screens went white. Two humans kissing in the corner took notice as one of them turned to use the wall as leverage. A pretty waitress emerged out the back carrying a plate of potato-skins. I had been unaware there was a kitchen and that it had been open. Do not dissolve. Those who were despised lived across the bridge in a town whose constitution was unable to define the boundaries under which it exists. A contingent of locals including all the names above will have built up an emergency task-force and would give their lives in the event of an attack. It fell over the town and turned to nothing the blue-sided houses and red-tiled roofs. There shot a rejoinder regarding the allocation of state funds. What was going on in Albany did not match to what was said on the ground, reported with strict urgency to the teams of engineers and contractors who had come to assess.