Friday Flash Fiction: Between the Breakers
Between the breakers
By Neil Beynon
He wobbles across the uneven rocks, scattered like broken teeth across the beach, until he reaches the smooth compressed sand beyond. He pauses for a moment, turns to look back at the cliffs behind him. If he is looking for something he does not find it on those rocky peaks looming large.
The tide is out and it takes him a little while to reach the edge of the ocean. He walks between the twin rows of breakers that line either side of his path like watery sentinels. He does not pause as he steps into the water, heedless of the cold saltwater on his shoes and trousers: it is not the first time he has done this. He wades out further into the water, ignoring the persistent slapping of the waves that almost push him back and his breath coming in short sharp drags.
When the water reaches his belly he stops but he does not turn back.
He looks down at the seabed; the sunlight breaks on the water casting small fragments of rainbow into the brine. She is waiting when he lifts his head. There between the half drowned breakers she stands, head and shoulders out of the water, face looking back at him. She looks exactly the same as she always does. He does not move as she draws close.
“You’re back?”
“Yes,” he answers, “I said I would be.”
“And you are such a keeper of your word?”
The woman’s hair is slightly wrong, just a hint too dark, the texture just a step the wrong side of smooth but beneath that she is slim as ever, gazing on him with beauty sculpted from high cheekbones and eyes that shone azure.
“You want more?” she asks.
“I want you,” he says. They are close enough to touch and he reaches forward, his hand running down her arm as if reassuring himself she’s real. “I want this.”
She does not flinch, as her eyes suggest she might, but steps closer. She raises her own hands, they slide up over the side of his face, she is cold to the touch but he sighs as if slipping into a warm bath. She holds him by either side of his temples, stopping him moving or looking away.
“It hurts,” she says.
“Why?”
“This form, her skin, it is not my shape.”
“What is your shape?”
“Is it even her shape?”
“I have missed you.”
“I am not her,” she says, letting him go. He could run now but he does not. “Why did your kind…? Is this how she felt?”
He shrugs.
“Even now, second time round, you will go again and carry on as normal. Until the next time.”
He says nothing for there is no answer: she is not wrong.
“It hurts, this shape hurts.”
“It’s not the shape,” he replies. He is tempted to look away, guilt coiling round his stomach and he fancies he feels something brush past his skin, an eel perhaps.
“No: it’s not,” she replies, staring at him with unblinking eyes.
He does not resist as she pushes him down under the water. It’s like a sheet of moving glass has been put between them as he looks up at her holding him down, the light splintering around her like a halo. From this perspective he can’t even notice the differences, she is the woman he remembers but not, he realises, the woman he knew and not even the salt water burning in his nostrils can distract him from her stare. He can feel the anger in her arms pushing him down, the proof of feeling, of caring enough to rage, and it is wonderful.
His chest is bloated tight with carbon dioxide and his hands do a frantic crab dance across the seabed, divorced from his mind and in search of a weapon. He finds one, pulling it free of the suction of the sand before letting it drop back to the floor. Afraid it will break the spell.
The tide is starting to turn and before long there will be no sign of his tracks as the ocean’s sweeping journey up the beach wipes clean the stains of his passing from the sand. Light is exploding behind his eyes warping his view of her, melding her into something else, his lids grow heavy and it’s hard to remember to keep his mouth closed.
She’ll let him up soon. She always does.
Review: Little Brother
Thursday morning I was rooting around the shelves for something to read on the train into work (I can’t use the bike at the moment as I can’t get it through the house as we still have boxes everywhere). Anyway, I picked up Little Brother having ordered it some time ago and have been slightly embarrassed that I hadn’t read it yet. I started on the train on the way in, continued on my lunch break (I never do this normally) and continued on the way home, reading as I walked from the station to the house and finished up around about midnight having pretty much inhaled the whole book.
It’s that good.
Marcus is smart, Marcus is a hacker, Marcus is a teenager, Marcus is a gamer and Marcus is about to land himself in a whole pile of trouble when he plays truant for a game- inadvertently placing himself in the middle of a terror attack on San Francisco. Held prisoner by the Department of Homeland Security Marcus finds himself treated as a potential terrorist before being released back into a city that has been transformed into a Police state. Angry, alienated and fearful for the future of his country Marcus decides there is only one thing for it, to take down the Department of Homeland Security. Calling on all his technology skills Marcus goes to war with the Department of Homeland Security, a war he can’t possibly win – after all, a seventeen year old kid can’t defeat his government, can he?
It would be easy to wax lyrical about how topical this book is or how well researched or how it’s pretty much a handbook for how to manage your data in a world where before long even your toaster will be online. And all this is true. I mean: it’s Cory – did you really expect anything less? Yet, I feel this misses the true success of the novel and that is the quality of the writing. Not the story – which is great riff on 1984 – but the actual technical process of how the words have been put down on the page to provoke a particular emotional reaction from the reader, the nuts and bolts of the book. Artfully constructed – like a Swiss watch – Doctorow plays the reader like a fiddle carrying this one from laughter to fascination to outrage to horror to celebration and back to outrage, all the while peppering the tale with real world information.
Although relying on the Internet quite heavily for the story you really don’t need to be a geek to enjoy this story and, in all likelihood, you may get more out of it if you’re not. For those who do – like me – spend large amounts of time online through work or whatever, you’ll see some really elegant explanations for things you see day in, day out and probably learn some stuff you should have known already, I know I did.
I don’t want to give the impression the book doesn’t have its weaker points. Some of Marcus’s first person narration isn’t entirely authentic as a seventeen year old – at least to my ears – but this could be down to the culture differences between the US (where the book is set) and the UK (where I am) or the generation difference**. The peppering of information also gets a little OTT in places and skirts the white line of info-dumping but as someone who really enjoys Neal Stephenson’s work I feel churlish pointing this out because Cory is nowhere near as prone to this as Stephenson. The novel’s faults, such as they are, do not clunk or throw the reader out of the story.
I found Little Brother to be a gripping, page turner that I really couldn’t put down. I would happily recommend this to any reader, old or young, SF fan or mainstream junkie. This is an important book, it won’t just entertain you, it will give you pause and change the way you think about the world you live in now as well as the one you’ll be living in tomorrow, all the while entertaining your socks off. You can’t ask more of SF than that.
Read it, read it now.
* Neil Gaiman, Wil Wheaton, Eric Brown, Farah Mendlesohn, StrugglingWriter and too many more to go on listing.
** Though it pains me to admit it.