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