LatinosUSA

Driving wind riffled the receding water back up onto the tidal flats. The gray sky was blackening. It suited my mood.

Knowing I was apt to get wet, I zipped up my windbreaker, leaned against the wind and sand-shuffled down to the shoreline.

Loose seaweed wallowed in the shallows, waiting for the storm to beach it. A lone woman stood erect out on the flat. In my usual state I would have slewed away from her, preferring to be alone. But I had a need for company and walked out to her.

Long gray-white hair streamed leeward from her head. I was leaning forward into the blow, but, petite as she was, she held vertical, as if staked into the sand.

Although she couldn’t have seen or heard my approach, she turned and motioned me to come near. She was quite old, with deeply defined facial wrinkles. My initial hello was too distant, blown backwards. I moved within touching range and tried again.

“Hi. Mind if I join you?”

Her smile was soft, almost rueful. “Not content with waiting inside for vacation weather to resume?”

“The weather suits my mood.”

“Ah. Mine as well. But you’re too young to be melancholic. So it must be a problem.”

The thrum of the wind forced us to speak in stage voices, as if we were projecting our words to the gods. My laugh was a harsh snort. “Problems plural.” I paused. “But I won’t bore you with my troubles.”

Her smile broadened.  “How better to amuse each other? Your difficulties are open cuts, mine are scarred over, but I can listen from experience.”

Opening up was too precipitous for me to manage, so I segued. “Do you usually come down here to welcome the storm?”

“Not a welcoming, more like listening to a magnificent overture of an opera that I know will be long and boring.” She squinted slightly, examining me more closely. “You’ve lost weight and your skin tone is poor, but I’m guessing your worry about your health isn’t why you squished your way out here to talk with an old woman you don’t know.”

I lived in a dying-while-living closed loop of depression and panic, and just recalling what had gone wrong flayed my nerves. “It’s complicated,” I said, hoping that the tired expression would divert further inquiry.

“Nonsense. Our problems are both finite and commonplace. Shall I guess about yours? Tell me when I’m wrong.”

Thunder growled from somewhere out over the sound. It matched my annoyance at her probing. “Sure, go ahead.”

“You have the look of a service dog who despite his best efforts is beaten. Lost your job?”

When I said nothing, she continued. “Your wedding ring is well worn, but coming to me suggests that you’re not really sharing your problems with your wife.”

“She knows all about them.”

The old woman smiled, not pleasantly. “She probably knows the facts, but not how you’re handling the situations. Your eyes tell me that you’ve got a death grip on day-to-day reality, worried that if you unclench, you’ll never be able to grasp it again.”

I almost blurted out an insult, but she wasn’t far off. I was in a locked down loop of anxiety that spouse, friends and therapy hadn’t been able to extricate me from. Then the blurt came anyway. “What can you possibly know about me? This is just some vicious seaside guessing.”

“Is it, Don? To your panicked credit I sense that you’re worried almost as much for other people as yourself. Wife of course and maybe an offspring- daughter is it? And your own compulsive dreads – losing the house, inability to pay for a wedding, poverty in old age, divorce, all the worms gnawing incessantly at you.”

 “That’s enough of this stupid game!” As I turned toward shore, she said, “Please, humor me for just another few minutes. Come stand next to me, facing the storm.”

Why I don’t know, but I went over to her and looked at the rain squalls and thunderheads working their way toward us. Her voice got more sing-song.

“See the slanted sheets of wet, the foreheads of the thunder gods as they suck up salt water and give back fresh, the pavanes of swirling grays, the rigor of its randomness… “

I fuzzed out briefly, and when I came back from wherever I’d been, the rain had reached me and she was gone, leaving me with a glimmer of hope. She’d guided my feet to the bottom of my slough of despond, and like the pilgrim I saw a way to climb up a painful path, deeply worried but no longer desperate.

I wanted to find her and thank her but no one I asked had ever heard of an old woman who faced into the overtures of storms. Over time I began to wonder if she wasn’t a product of my nearly suicidal delusions. But as often as I can, I return to that tidal flat in advance of a storm and wait for the thunderheads to develop.

End

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Bio:

Ed Ahern resumed writing after forty odd years in foreign intelligence and international sales. He’s had 550 stories and poems published so far, and twelve books. Ed works the other side of writing at Bewildering Stories where he manages a posse of six review editors, and as lead editor at Scribes Micro.