A Picturesque Scene
A Picturesque Scene
Summary: A vacationer’s dream. Postcard material, really.
A canary-yellow belly faces the sky, swaying gently to the rhythms of a lazy afternoon. It faces an artist’s sky, the type with pure white clouds lined with golden sunlight and a carefree shade of blue.
Some kilometres away, no doubt, someone perched on a sun-heated rock or nestled in a muskoka chair with a cocktail in hand, will look back on this time with a twinge in their worn and tired heart and think of it as a happier time. Such a tragedy, isn’t it? How the cries of determination only fade away, ardent agony quietly hurrying into the shadows to make way for the glory of an idyllic summer. Here is the almighty will to live: a mere speck zoomed in on by novels and drama.
The methodic splashes and gurgles of water have condensed a bit strangely. Elsewhere, they are a soft backdrop to sizzles, chatter, hoots, and laughter. Here, some distance away—isolated from the gangly, leafy fingers softly skimming the water and the squawking seagulls circling around and the bobbing shapes in the water and anything and everything save for a half-submerged canary-yellow boat—they are a little stronger. Just a little.
Windmill arms grasp for something, anything. A measly twig, a rock, a turtle. Even the gusts of wind steadily pushing away the canary-yellow boat. They slap noisily, pathetically, against the surface, sending up grand displays of white and blue. The surface, which so insistently resists against the belly flopping children some distance away, crumbles away under tanned limbs like sand. They wave around faster now, as a stomach fills with the fishy, algae-tinged lake water, only to be rewarded with nothing but patient waves, easing hard-earned ripples into nonexistence.
So we are left with a symphony of questions, the shrill opera expelled from an aching throat—which someone must have mistaken for a bird song—having stepped away from the spotlight a long time ago. How did we get here? What about the shelves that haven’t been dusted, the achievements that haven’t been achieved, the moments that haven’t been lived? Why did the lifejacket have to go abandoned in the dusty corner of the closet? Why did a body, taking a rest from rental payments and constant arguments and rush hour traffic, have to be woken up by cold and wet and the world going sideways?
Would they be missed? Were they only ever a faceless passerby?
Given a sudden surge of all the miracles the world could squeeze out, tired limbs could have made it to shore. But waves—as comforting, forbidding, and unsettling as the ticking of time running out—kept on coming. One after another. And another. And another.
