Casey Gilfillan

She looks at me dotingly, eyes glancing just slightly upward under the light cover of lashes. Then a plume surrounding her, emerging from her lungs and framing her face for a moment. The wisps of white smoke flowering out like a mane and then up and shapeless and then gone. She has the face of a pixie, curt and smooth jaw, eyes with an amber luminescence, lips that captivate and lull. She inhales and exhales once more, taking a longer pause in between before showering me in the fog. The flickering LED advertisement of the diner’s specials casts a dim light, it does not quite reach us. She passes the cigarette, leans further onto the trunk of my sedan.

I exhale and watch as it dances towards the muted beam of the lamppost. And then I am stomping out the cigarette, crushing and dragging it beneath my foot like it is something that must die. It does. “You ready?” I ask, she slinks giddily towards the passenger side.

We are in the car, driving down the pike and the expressway until it spits us out along the shoreline. I see glimpses of her, the red and yellow glow of advertisement lighting up the inside of the car in colorful flashes. I feel her looking at me, her hand climbing from my knee to the middle of my thigh and choosing to rest there; her grip of excitement as the salty air permeates the car’s interior. She opens the window and the salt burrows in my lungs.

I park and we make our way towards the entrance to the beach. A road without any houses, flat and sandy on both sides, leads up to the mouth of the narrow path that is framed and then swallowed by a sea of beachgrass. The crickets and cicadas play to our stroll, the song becoming more aggressive the closer we are in proximity to the path.

“Wait- ,” she says as she pulls two palm-sized vodkas from her bag, “they’re mango” cracking open the plastic seal. We touch them to each other and then our lips and they are gone in an instant, the burn lingering for a moment longer. We are down the path in a flurry, shoes fly off and our feet hit the cool, night sky sand.

We keep running, running and running and kicking sand all the while as we hasten to the waterfront. We stop about 10 feet from the water, just before the sand loses its plumpness, flattens out and eventually floods. I feel her hand reach for mine, my eyes do not leave the ocean’s grasp. The blackness and vast nothingness of the ocean against the midnight sky, with no color or mark of distinction to split the line. And so when you look out, you look out into a massive black pit of nothing, waiting in terror for it to inhale and suck you right in like the black hole it must be. This is dark matter, the end of the world, the sun inverted in on itself. It looks like every scary thought you’ve ever had about the dark, and it is everywhere. Suddenly it is not only when you look out, but up and left and right; it extends forever and expands exponentially and your eyes all but spin into your head because it is so beyond their perception even as they perceive it. I want to run away; I want to run full speed ahead.

My eyes are released from this trance and I turn and see her, she is squeezing my hand, she is in doe-eyed dilation. And then I finally see beyond the enormity of the sky before me, I can finally see what she is trying to silently alert me about. Beyond the brush and into the center of the small beachgrass forest, I spot two red-tipped ears. Then the eyes, black and peering out, tracking each rise and fall of our chests. I squeeze her hand, my back to the gaping mouth of void.  I find myself wondering if the fox would entertain an evening swim.