Come June [ h.s. ]

10

10

.

It was nine in the evening, and the sky above Harry's beach cottage faded slowly from a pink horizon to a large expanse of blackness. He was stretched across the bed on his bare stomach, flipping through a book of poems by Mary Oliver and sticking notes around his favorite verses.

It was a joy to finally be reading poetry again. Shortly after he left London, he arranged for some of his boxes to be shipped. Most of them contained extra appliances, such as the little orange tea kettle, and some books he'd set aside for the move. Leaving so suddenly had proven to be far more inconvenient than planning ahead; but none of that mattered, now. Harry was finally feeling at home in this new place, and that was all he could ask for.

He lifted a carton of apple juice to his lips while thumbing through the pages and took a sip. The container was awkwardly small for an adult his size (the kind children packed in their school lunches, with a bended straw). He drained it within minutes, crumpled up the container, and tossed it over his shoulder like a Neanderthal--

And soon after, figuring he'd better avoid making a mess, he decided to pick it up and carefully dispose of it in the kitchen.

The ocean was hardly visible to him as he peered out the window. Because the sun set in the opposite direction, the beach behind his house looked dark and ominous. Only the fleeting light of the moon was visible. It capped the waves as they rippled back and forth, creating glimmers that disappeared almost as quickly as they came.

Harry thought of Eileen.

He thought of the conversation they'd had there, just over the dunes. He could practically feel the sand, dark from rain, glistening and crunching beneath their feet with every step.

She made him laugh.

He'd almost forgotten how it felt to laugh like that.

It gave him the strangest sensation, one that alternated between joy and fear-- the joy came from her, and the fear came from himself. He hadn't kept many close friends over the past few years, and wasn't quite sure how to do it again. Maybe that was why Eileen made him nervous.

He didn't want to dwell on the thought, however; especially so late in the evening. With light steps, he treaded back towards his room in the hopes of finding some more good poems before he went to sleep.

Everything else could wait until morning.

.

Harry had terrible dreams that night.

They seemed to fade in and out of one another, to the point at which he couldn't tell where one ended, and the next began. His sense of reality and sleep were completely blurred; this was mostly due to the fact that the dreams were vividly real.

It began, at first, with the ocean.

It was moving in the darkness, just as it had when he looked out the kitchen window. This time, however, he was in the middle of it; his arms and legs were strapped to a wooden raft, bound tightly so he couldn't escape. All he could see was the emptiness of the sky. He felt the water moving beneath him, growing rougher and colder as it sloshed against his sides and across his face. For a while he managed to bear it.

Then the raft flipped over.

A giant wave enveloped his body and sent him face-down into the black. His eyes opened, peering into whatever lurked below, and his arms and legs flailed aimlessly in the ropes that bound them.

He screamed.

The soundless cry left his mouth and took all of the air in his lungs with it. Slowly he drowned, gasping into the water until there was nothing left-- and just as he faded into that nothingness, something else began.