There Was Death In His Eyes - Chapter 1

There was death in his eyes. At first glance, he was nothing more than a scrawny boy with pale lips and wind-blown hair, his knuckles pink from the cold as he scratched hopscotch boxes on the creaking boat dock with powder blue sidewalk chalk. The second time she looked down at him, crouched on his bony denim-swathed knees, looking unabashedly back at her as the cold wind sent loose strands of brown hair skulking across her face, she couldn’t breathe. The thick Marlboro smoke froze in her throat.

Suicide.

Even in the wind, she was unable to shut her eyes. They fastened with his; dark and trenchant against the pale of his skin, vaguely dampened by the ocean’s spray as it crashed around them. She watched him even as he turned to continue scrawling the squares and numbers down; first 10, then 8 and 9, then 7, the rubber toes of his old gray sneakers thudding against the weathered planks, dragging untied laces as he scooted back with every new row.

She forced her eyes shut and turned away, trying to catch her breath, though her lungs only seemed able to handle short huffs. She pressed the heels of her hands onto her eyelids, smoke still spilling out from the cigarette fixed loosely between the knuckles of two fingers

The image had been quick, like a camera’s flash, but the fear had lingered as the smell of smoke did on her breath. His jaw overlying a linen noose, so taut it seemed to be trying to merge with his neck. Wrists twitching violently then fading into stillness, sneakers hovering above the ground, untied shoelaces swaying limply while their plastic-wrapped tips quietly slid against the floorboards, his dark eyes turned up, veined and bloodshot.

“You shouldn’t be smoking.”

His voice shook her from her uneasy haze and she glanced quickly at him before turning away again. He stood beside her now, his head only reaching up to her shoulder, his face pensive as he looked out over the squares and numbers. Slowly, he pulled a smooth brown rock from his back pocket and flung it onto the dock, landing with a clunk on 7.

“Your baby could be born a cigarette addict,” he said offhandedly as his left foot landed on the first box.

Her eyes fell. There was a firm bump protruding from beneath the large pockets of her pullover sweater. Up until now, she’d thought she could pass it off as a beer belly; a form of payback for all those incessant nights at Pen’s Bar. But it was too high on her stomach now to be passed off as anything besides its small growing self. She didn’t reply to his comments, his matter-of-factly stated health facts. She only watched him, jumping from box to box, one foot then two hitting the planks, making them vibrate a little beneath her shoes.

She would have been annoyed at him, this strange boy who had so casually interfered with her alone time, beginning the outlines of his game while she stood watching the rousing waves, silently forlorn within the bitter chill and gloom of the gray morning. But that frighteningly unexpected glimpse of death, the approaching tragedy that felt so real, so certain to happen, as if watching a wave roll nearer at the surf, had cast a different light upon him. He was momentary. A fleeting life standing there with her, only to last so long. Watching him hop along the dock, content with the tossing and snatching of that rock, the gray sea always in motion, stretching out behind him, brought on an intense urge to touch his hand.

It took her a moment, and at first she didn’t realize she had done it. The cigarette was now on the ground between them. With his hand so small and frozen and slightly dusty with chalk remains clasped gently within hers, she looked at him, paused now with one foot on 4. His face was slightly freckled, and one small dimple grooved into the right corner of his mouth. As he looked up at her, he smiled faintly and set his other foot back down on the ground. Searching for any sort of change in mind-set, blaming the macabre thought on outlandish hormones, she earnestly looked once more at his eyes, inexplicably profound in their shade, and once more she saw his death.