...The Old Man

~The Old man snatched up his cards and ferried them broadways across the table to the dealer. He’d stayed long into the night and the time to leave this place had long since passed. He scooped up the tokens that were his and counted them out stacking them orderly by color and pushing them forward towards the man whose shack he and the rest had been sharing the evening with. The host recounted the stacks setting them back neatly into the stained  and leathered box that housed the chips and cards along with an old worn Texas Instruments calculator he’d used to total up the dividends of many an evening past spent.

The host tallied up the count and uncoupled the hasp of the old cigar box that he’d used to ferret away the notes and coins which the players had traded for earlier in the evening and as necessary throughout the game. He pulled out a small sheaf of bills and a handful of assorted pocket change and handed the folded notes and coins to the old man. The old man crumpled up the evenings take and pushed it all into his pocket. He lifted his lighter and cigarettes from the place where he’d sat and ushered them away into his clothing as well. He thanked the host and the other players still seated around the table and rose to take his leave.  

The night air greeted him as he stepped to the walk leading down the hill from the shanty house. An ocean wind serried and rocked about his ankles blowing sand and cut sedge grass from out of the yard as he made his way down the path. Seabirds and crickets called out softly before him beckoning him forth into the darkness.

Setting out on foot beyond the broken and crumbled concrete paving’s he headed east towards the dunes. The moon had ridden high up into the vault and the Pleiades shone brightly above Orion as the heavenly objects in the firmament spun downward in their declination towards the rim of the earth itself. Wild oats and sea grass hissed and chaffed as he descended the roughhewn narrow boardwalk that cut its swale across and out over the combs. The strand was broad and solemn and lay out before him his path dimly lit by the light cast down from the orbits in the breach above.

He walked on at an unhurried pace the sound of the crests breaking along the hard packed sands thundering their arrival upon the shores and the slurry of their recession back into the sea carrying along with it sand and aggregate bits of shell signaling their endless return, waters forever giving and receiving back and forth throughout all of eternity droning on and on their ceaseless hellos and goodbyes delivering parcels from beneath the waves and depositing their secrets upon the apron of the world.

He ratcheted a cigarette up and out of his pack and cupped his hands around his lighter to fetch off the wind. The day yet lay ahead approaching somewhere from behind him in the heaving spin of the planet.

He walked on for some time before he sat and removed his over shirt placing it beneath him a barrier against  the grit and fine scrabble, the sea breeze carrying with it  a light mist blowing leeward, an empty chill in the salted air and everywhere all about him a hushed silence like some promenade of despair.

He reclined back his knees pulled skywards and perpendicular to the earth his vertical gaze toward the speckled void. The great expanse of the heavens above pierced the sparse and delicate cloud cover that lay out before him, some great unreckonable mystery. He closed his eyes and his thoughts drifted silently away the sound of the waves hypnotic Gods own metronome.

  Memories, glimpses of some former life long since passed floated before him, specters of former acquaintances, their voices, their faces unlined unscathed by the harshness of time forever placid and young, vibrant, carefree as if the earth itself could somehow stay  times ceaseless appraising of them. Haunting remembrances displaced and ageless like some atavistic and alien beings whose shapes, whose existences could only be memorialized by him.  A parallel imagination of sorts specific only to him, some inward and personal recollection of his own doing although real and mentally tangible as the night sky before him caressed his soul, soothed his spirit and carried him away towards some friendlier plane of interior awareness. 


... He drifted off.

The shifting distance between cognitive reality and dreamscape ebbed and flowed, like some tidal hyper reality ordained and baptized by life itself.  Images of time spent, of things done and undone forever sifting together seamlessly in the ether world of unconscious being.

He dozed. His dreams of better times, of times well spent with friends, with loved ones. Realities cobbled together with fantastic imagery, emergent possibilities that could only take place deep inside his very core. Hours past as days, as years even, in his reduced state of sub-cognitive awareness. Future histories made real and tangible only through deep slumber, only to become lost again though wakefulness and reclaimed later, perhaps in future dreams, only again to be disremembered and cast aside forevermore.

He awoke to the crashing sounds of the sea by which he lay prostrate and sprawled out on the sands just below the dunes. The sun had just begun its ascent, its broken shape articulated upon the waters blood red, burning, seething, making known its own timeless indisputable course.

He rose dusting off the granular chaff from his legs and ankles and shaking out his sleep wrinkled shirt. He stood and turned away from the water and made his way towards the dunes above. The dawn of a new day, a new chance, some unknowable set of possibilities lay out before him. He stepped forth and the earth beneath his feet hurtled out upon its own endless enduring course doing its best to keep pace with him.~