Brief Encounter

3
Sun Burn
“These are big waves,” he shouted in my direction. I looked at
him and said nothing.
There was silence for a moment as we both sat on our
surfboards in the calmly rocking water. There hadn’t been any
waves large enough to ride the whole morning.
“Where are you from?” he asked. He wore a white cotton t-shirt
soaked limpid by the ocean. The shirt clung to his arms and
torso displaying his skinny and undefined body. He was pale.
Under the summer sun, his face had begun to turn pink from
prolonged exposure.
Something about his aura seemed sinister and I couldn’t help
but think of human destruction upon nature. I thought of
forests ablaze from forgotten cigarettes, farms with chickens
obese and swollen from injected hormones, skies filled with a
brown-grey haze of exhaust, wrinkled and dried river beds from
years without rainfall.
“California,” I responded sharply lost in my thoughts of
disaster and death. I looked at him again. In what had been but
a moment, his face had transitioned from a glowing pink to a
burning red. His body, which I had originally observed as thin,
appeared more angular and pointed. He seemed to have
protrusions that moved under his skin like beetles crawling
under wallpaper.
Growing increasingly repulsed and worrying that I had been in
the sun for too long as to be imagining such horrors, I decided
to head back to the shore. I paddled away cautiously and did
not look back.
Once on the beach, I immediately began to feel better. I sat on
the sand and looked out towards the water. I saw a wave rising
larger and larger in the distance. I saw him, the devil himself.
He was on the wave cackling with glee, happy and sunburnt on
the hot, summer day.