Artwork credit: @tanglebranch

The Beautiful Sea

“Morty?”

“Yes, Rebecca?”

“If there was something, or someone, to visit across the sea, what do you imagine it might be?”

“You mean who.”

“I do?”

“Yes.” Morty scooped up a handful of sand and let it run through his fingers, countless grains falling to earth. The sun was lowering toward the edge of the world, and now stars were coming out. Here under the big sky, by the endless ocean, troubles seemed small.

He looked out across the water. “There are people to visit. And they are happy and kind.”

Rebecca held her favorite pillow, the one Morty’s mother called her "security pillow". With her mother very sick, Rebecca spent a lot of time at his house, and Morty’s mother treated her like her own daughter. It made him smile.

“But why should we visit them? How is it different there?”

“Well. They eat cake anytime they want.”

“Oh! I love cake.” Rebecca found another mollusk shell and added it to her pile. “What else?”

Morty thought for a bit. They played this game sometimes, imagining other places, other worlds. Once they dreamed up an entire kingdom under the sea. “They have gigantic gardens. The vegetables are giant too. Beans longer than your arm. Tomatoes bigger than your head. One potato is enough for a whole pot of soup.”

Rebecca laughed. “Also, the pets are huge. Cats as big as a car. Dogs the size of elephants.”

“And very cuddly.” He smiled at her through the dusk. “Oh, and nobody ever gets sick there. They have cured everything.”

Rebecca held her pillow close. “Even cancer?”

“Yes. Especially cancer.”

Morty looked out to sea. Four pelicans were gliding together, flying low along the whitecaps, just beyond the shore. He sighed, watching them, and wondered what it would be like to fly.

Rebecca hugged her pillow tighter. “What about bad people?”

Morty shrugged. “There aren’t too many of those. And they are kept busy with chores. As punishment.” He looked for the pelicans, but they had flown beyond the lighthouse and out of sight. “Bullies stop bullying, because every time they do it, they have to scrub toilets or clean up dog poop.”

“People like Jake Peterson?”

Morty didn’t say anything for a moment, for emotion welled up in him, and he did not trust his voice to sound as it should. He looked up at Venus, clear and bright. “Yeah. And Chip Mulligan. Those guys have to do all the dirty work. All the awful stuff no one else wants to do.”

“Good,” Rebecca said. Morty saw that she had set the pillow back in her lap. They leaned back on their elbows now and watched as the sun slipped down, at last, into the sea.

---

High on a hill overlooking the ocean, a couple stepped through a patio door onto their deck. The woman made quiet sobbing sounds. They walked to the railing, several paces apart, and looked down on the beach where two children sat watching the sunset.

The man wasn’t sure what to say to her. He kept his distance, and waited. They had argued about the same old things. “You just don’t get me,” she said. And like always, because he was frustrated too, the things he said only managed to make things worse. “What is there to get? Are you some deep dark secret? If only I had special powers!”

That hadn’t gone over well. They began shouting after that. Everything one of them said made the other angrier. Finally, she threw a glass to the floor, shattering it into a thousand pieces. It seemed like a sign, somehow. He had a sudden desperate fear that she would leave him.

The sun dipped below the water’s edge and was gone. All that was left was a pale glow along the horizon, and a giant dome of emerging stars above.

He moved a bit closer. “I’m sorry. I just….”

She waved the air between them dismissively. But he saw that she shivered a bit, with the cooler evening breeze coming in off the ocean. He stepped to her, placing his arm across her shoulders and gently pulling her to him.

“Look,” she said. She was watching the children on the sand below. “They are so young. They haven’t a care in the world. I wish….” Her voice faded away.

As a child, he had come to this coastal village with his family in the summertime, to this very house. He thought of the beach fires and pig roasts, and all the songs they used to sing. The summer he met her at a community bonfire, they were just 16, as carefree as those two children by the shore.

He held her close now. “We were like that. Remember?”

She smiled. “Yes.” Then after a moment she added, “Do you think we can be happy again?”

He took her hand, and they began to dance in the dusky stillness. As they moved around the sun-weathered deck, he sang one of the old songs.

“By the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea,
You and me, you and me, oh how happy we’ll be.
When those waves come a-rollin’ in,
We will dunk or swim,
We will float and fool around the water,
Over and under, and then up for air,
Pa is rich, Ma is rich, so then what do we care?
I want to be beside your side beside the sea,
Beside the seaside, by the beautiful sea.”

Dusk was turning to dark, yet no moon rose. Holding her in his arms, he kissed the lingering tears away from her eyelashes.

Nearby, a woman’s voice was calling “Morty! Rebecca! It’s getting dark! Come in, now.” The children stood up and ran toward the wooden steps that climbed the steep hillside, their laughter nearly swallowed by sounds of the ocean.

They were alone, then, the man and the woman, caught between innocence and the heavens, looking for answers by the beautiful sea.

---

Thank you for reading! This piece is my entry for the Art Prompt Writing Contest by @gmuxx. I would like to thank the wonderful editors at The Writers' Block for their help in fine tuning this piece. And congratulations to @tanglebranch for winning the art contest that preceded and inspired this contest.

If you are an aspiring writer, be sure to check out @thewritersblock here on Steemit, and on the Discord app.