A Disobedient Will -- Short Fiction by Cliff

Will didn’t care that the sand blew grey across the parking lot, its color a sick reflection of the clouds.

He had thought the sand would match his blonde curls, which he wore to the nape of his neck. He felt them jounce in time to his gait, the music of which he could almost hear. He did hear the ocean – the Pacific Ocean, which he had seen for the first time that weekend – and the gulls, which were bigger than any he had ever seen back home around Lake Michigan.

Ocean gulls, he thought. Vacation gulls. He fit the words to his steps.

He started down the access road, between the dunes to the beach. Though he was closer to the ocean, the dunes muffled the sound of the waves. The wind swished sand through the scrub above his head, and he was glad for the windbreak.

But he didn’t care that it was cold.

His family – cousins and baby sister, parents, aunt, and grandma – was huddled around a fire ring on the beach. Boring, and a fat lot of good the fire did anyway: the wind was taking the heat out to sea faster than it could warm them. They needed something to do.

And he had it.

**

Shelly had dark hair, and books in her aura. She followed the concrete walkway through the dunes, hurrying when it curved around a hillock that exposed her to the wind, and slowing on the quiet sides. She relished how the damp sand clumped together and rolled in little balls to the base of the dunes, and wondered at how the wet grains clung to the rushes.

Had the wind blown it dry into moisture that clung to the stalks, or had it been ferocious enough to pick it up, wet and heavy, from the piled earth?

A vista opened to the beach, and she saw the waves beneath the grey sky, and the flames inside the fire ring, and the people with each other.

**

Tamara, standing before the fire wrapped in a blanket, watched her son approach across the sand. He seems happy, she thought. She glanced across at Dan as he joked with her sister, something about cucumbers and the difference between horny and hungry. Raunchy jokes meant he was happy, too.

She sighed over how good the trip had been for them. “That’s a good sigh,” her mom remarked.

Tamara laughed. “Oh, I’m happy.” She waved her hand. “This has been great.”

“You pulled it off.”

“Yeah.” The whole extended-family-adventure had been Tamara’s brainchild.

“Mom,” Will said just before he entered the circle. “There’s mopeds for rent. Twenty-five dollars for an hour.”

The girls – 5, 7, and 10 – jumped up from their blanketed huddle. “Mopeds!”

“Mom, we have to,” Will said.

Tamara looked at Dan; could they, her eyes wondered, they’re so young . Dan took her query as a no. “I think it’s a little cold for riding around on mopeds,” he said.

**

Will stomped back up the road.

“A little cold! Shitfuckinghell. That’s so goddamn stupid.”

He had waited to vent, with those words, until he was safely between the dunes. On the beach he had said nothing, just turned and left. He kicked himself for not having the balls, but deep down he knew it was better to make a point than to argue – or risk being grounded the third day into vacation.

“It’s not too fucking cold,” he said to the wind.

**

Tamara waited until she could discreetly go after Will, but her mother still knew what she was doing. Whatever. She didn’t think Dan would care if she let Will ride the mopeds; it had only been her look that made him say no. The girls didn’t need to go; it could be just Will; he was old enough. And maybe that would even please him more, if he got to do it because he was the older one, the only one responsible enough.

There’s no room for disappointment on vacation, she told herself. In her hand she held $25 of her own money that he could use.

When she started down the road between the dunes, she saw Will talking to a young woman. She was smiling, and he was animated. It took her a minute to realize what was going on – her son was flirting. At first she wanted to go to him and tell him to stop that, leave her alone, don’t act like that, but as she stood and watched – as he gestured and told the young woman god-knows-what that made her smile– she realized just how appropriate her son was behaving.

“Christ,” she marveled. “He’s 17.”

She put the $25 back in her jeans, and went back to the fire. Later, she just smiled at Dan’s look – which asked if discipline was required – when Will and the young woman sped by on a moped, the young woman’s dark hair streaming behind them.

It looked to Tamara like they were gliding.

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Photo from Pixabay, by LeighJohnsonNZ