Beaches are Just Another Place

Breathing in, she feels the damp air sink into her body and hit her lungs. The air is so thick with moisture that it feels like swimming while she walks. Florida, she thinks to herself, is a shit hole. She follows her group of friends towards the beach access point, wearing a t shirt over her bikini top with no pants or shorts to cover her bikini bottom.

She catches the eyes of a man passing her by, coming from the beach, with his shirt off and his swim trunks in a 1970's short-short style. Why did this style become popular again? she thinks to herself, but also feels intrigued at the same time.

He locks eyes with her, feeling quite embarrassed by the shorts his ex chose for him during the winter, while they were on the clearance rack of the surf shop just up the road a little way. The drinks he had earlier have firmly set in and the feeling disappears just as quickly as it appeared.

A portable speaker plays a trendy pop song loud enough for far too many people to hear underneath an umbrella where two women try to hide the joint they are sharing, but the smell is wafting through the crowd of people, causing quite a wide range of diversified feelings.

A woman pops up from her beach towel. She scans the horizon as best as she can, looking intensely for something. Frantic, paranoid, and on high alert with her eyes darting in every direction as quickly as possible. Her child is behind her trying to pack sand together to form a castle, but its too dry to hold together and so the best he can muster is a pyramid of sand. She stands up and begins yelling, "Finny! Finny?!?!?!" Her son laughs from behind her, and she turns quickly enough that her eyes could fly out of her head if they weren't attached by everything that attaches to them. She smiles, picks him up, and kisses him on his forehead as the sand covering his hands fall off over her body.

A man peers from behind his glasses, looking for a woman who looks young and supple enough to approach for a good time. There are plenty, but he is weighing out his options, deciphering which one is intoxicated enough to not be put off by his approach while simultaneously not being so intoxicated that she would be more trouble than what he sees her worth as being. He sees the women smoking weed and decides that they disgust him - drugs lead to homelessness and communism. He drinks more of his Coors Light.

Another man tosses a football to his friend while being far too conscious about his own appearance compared to everyone else. He is wearing a white t shirt with Taylor Swift's face strewn on the front with khaki shorts that drop below his knees. The shirt is his wife's, but his typical dark wardrobe would attract far too much heat, he decided, and thus threw the concert T on before his Jacksonville Jaguars cap, covering up his bald spot.

The woman walking behind her friends onto the beach sees the man wearing the Taylor Swift shirt and thinks about how she hopes to find a man who is secure enough with himself to wear a Taylor Swift shirt to the beach someday.

A young boy walks over to a neighboring little girl's sand castle and kicks it over before pointing and laughing at her, then running away. He is too young to acknowledge that he just doesn't know how to deal with having a crush so he treats her poorly for making him feel a way he is unaccustomed to.

A couple are tying off under the pier so they can spike their arms full of, at least in part, heroin.

Four wheelers driven by the beach patrol cruise on by to make sure no violence happens.

The life guards are whistling at teenagers to move away from the pier's large posts, as the tides are coming in too strong to risk. They only listen insofar as to get the whistling to stop, but after a half hour or so they will naturally migrate closer again without even knowing it.

Another man is coating his children with sunscreen while they whine about how much they hate it. He is forgetting to put the sunscreen on himself. The children won't even consider the fact that they aren't getting sunburnt because of this act they find so atrocious. He will hate himself for forgetting it by the time he goes to bed at night as he will be in so much pain that he won't be able to get comfortable.

Meanwhile, a quarter mile away there are large SUV's pulling onto a sidewalk and having a half dozen men jumping out of the car, slamming a pregnant woman to the ground and putting her in handcuffs as she screams about how she is a citizen. The men don't care. One of them will consider raping her in a porta-potty - whether or not it happens will depend on how bad of a day that man is having - as will whether or not they will release the woman.

-Dustin S. Stover