The light is weird, it fills the sky but does not fall, a yellowing haze with no particular source or discernible direction, so very bright, yet the street’s left in uncertain shadow. He makes his way around heaps of shattered ice, avoiding puddled ponds of meltwater, stepping over rivulets that overwhelm sidewalk seams, leaping across hastily improvised deltas, his shoes, black wingtips, yet spotlessly polished, his black shoes, his trousers grey, dark greatcoat a-flap about his shins and over it a puffy pale blue parka zipped up to his chin and his hands stuffed in the pockets of that, the hood down about his shoulders, and on his head instead a brown slouch hat, a single drooping chrysanthemum maroonly bobbing from its burgundy puggaree, and beneath the wide brim of it the blank black lenses of a classic pair of sunglasses. A hitch in his step, he lifts a heel to kick a chunk of ice, sending it skittering to smash against more ice ahead, an enfilade of cloudy white-crumbled teal about the base of a skewed lamppost. Whistling tunelessly, another kick and a sliding step, a twirl, skirts of his greatcoat flying out beneath that constricting parka, slouch hat dipped with his head. Past a sedan half-crushed by a dump of ice, fender crumpled, front tire at an undriveable angle, windshield caved beneath the blue-green bulk of it, an enormous irregular knob, scooped and fluted by unimaginable winds, marred by white striations deep within, where the stress of impact failed to crack it apart, where fissures will appear, and widen, as it melts, channels will open and spread as it slumps, subsiding the apparently solid bulk of it into nothing more than water, water from ice, and light, that yellowed light caught within as sparks and spangles, pulsing flares to green the blue of it, so brightly warm.
A pop, a splintering rush of sound, he freezes, arms out, it’s just ice there toppling unbalanced from the roof of a building ahead, a showering crash of watery ice to the eaves of the storey below. He straightens, slowly, carefully, slipping those hands of his back into the pockets of his parka. Nothing else is falling, nothing but settling aftermath. Peerless Puffin, says a sign up there, revealed by the fallen ice.
Past that, the street opens out in a compact lot, a half-dozen cars still neatly parked, half of them totaled or at the least battered by more ice. The lot ends with a low picket fence about a meagre courtyard, a couple-three concrete picnic tables, one of them appears to have withstood a direct impact, drifts and slopes of white-cracked shards and splinters beneath and about and there atop it a white-stroked yellow-green crumbling nodule, big as a torso, gravidly bigger, but that round concrete table, surrounded by its benches, held. The courtyard’s looped by a narrow access road upheld by an embankment, and then, below the ice-decked grey-black light-struck pavement of it, the beach.
The beach, dull gold, hard-packed, stretched flat but dredged and pocked by more of that fallen ice, blankly colorless out there, hundreds of inscrutable gnomons beneath the light that’s found some source now, above, ahead, the sun, up there, somewhere, on its way down the slope of the day toward the horizon, the sea, there the sky, the line between them manifested by a darkening to chase the edge of the world, shadowing the sea, inching up the sky, toward the shore, out where inches mean miles. He doffs his hat, careful of the flower, and his head is wrapped about in a scarf, paisleys purple and gold that he shoves back and down, about his shoulders, to reveal unruly brown hair, and he takes off those sunglasses to reveal eyes of an esoteric brown set in a face quite young, an unlined face settling into a smile that somehow appreciates the inevitability of it all.
Well, he says.
Under the erratically whistling whipping gusts a rising growl, a drumming thrumble approaching with that thickening darkness, and he lowers his head, shakes it, lifts the hat to settle it back in place with the one hand, restoring his sunglasses with the other. That darkness lofting even as the bulk of it dripping drooping sheeting falling as that sound deepens and grows, the calm unruffled surface of the sea out there clouding to dissolve the clear line of the horizon, fizzing leaping exploding with thousands upon thousands of impacts too heavy too full to be any sort of rain, too large to be mere hail. The sheen and color drains from the beach, the yet calm water before him dulling, greying even as waves yet roll in, sweep out. The wind’s built from gusts to a full-on steady rush away from what is coming, flattening grass, sleeting sand and ice, tearing at the skirts of his coat, yanking loose one end of his scarf a banner streaming, he’s holding his hat in place, and the flower, This, he says, to whom, to no one else, to himself, this, he says, will suffice.
“You need a social, sweetie,” says the older woman.
“The license isn’t enough?” says Jo. “I mean, that’s me, the hair’s different, but that’s definitely me, you can see that, right?”
The license, there on the glass countertop between them, the photo in the corner expressionlessly surly, blond hair cropped close with a couple-few locks left here and there long, dyed black. “Oh, it’s fine,” says the older woman, pushing her spectacles back into place, clicker of the beaded chain securing them about her neck. “But you need something else, to prove you can work.”
“Oh, I can work,” says Jo.
“In the country, sweetie. We have to keep those illegals out.”
“Pretty sure the last time I did this I just had to have the license.”
“Then the last time you did this, you were working for somebody who didn’t do it right. I do it right.” She taps the form laid out by the license, “You need one from column A, or one each from columns B and C. You got a passport? Because that, you’d only need that.”
Leaned on the counter, Jo looks away, the clutter all about, jewel-toned scarves in such profusion, candies in labeled tin pots, pairs of hand-dipped candles slung by their joint wicks from wooden dowels, neat stacks of notecards displaying flowers, and statuary, and sailing ships, neater stacks of books, identical copies arrayed for sale, A Witch’s Herbal, The Færie Handbook, The Big Book of Oregon Ghost Stories, Fairy Spells, all beneath bright saffron garlands of plastic marigolds, and sagging strands of multi-colored pennants, hanks of breathless prayer flags, “I was never going anywhere,” she says, turning back, “the hell would I need a passport.”
“Yup,” says the older woman, “most folks go with a license and a social. Or your birth certificate.” Her blouse of periwinkle, under a calico vest, her greying hair cut short. On the counter by her elbow a tidy stack of business cards, crowded with a cheery logo, The Knick-Knack Bric-a-Brac Lost & Found Curiosity Shoppe and General Good-Time Establishment, Ræchel Teitelbaum, Prop. “I mean,” says Jo, “I know the number,” looking down, lips pursed, her saggy, short-sleeved shirt a dusty pink, the collar and the placket of it maroon.
“Your mother has to have that stuff somewhere,” says Kristen, coming up behind the older woman, “the way she squirrels everything away,” her polo shirt a periwinkle to almost match the older woman’s blouse. “That,” says Jo, “that’s not happening. You think she’d lift a hangnail, to help me out from under her thumb?”
“You have time,” says the older woman. “You’ve got your license, write down your number, and you’ll have ninety days to produce the card itself. I can keep you on the payroll for ninety days. That’s plenty of time to turn something up, or get a new one, or,” she shrugs.
“Well,” says Jo, “shit. Okay. Let’s do it.”
The older woman taps the license on the glass, “Let me just go make a scan of this for the file,” she says.
“Told you,” says Kristen.
“Yeah, but it’s gonna end up being, what, ten, twelve hours a week? That’s not gonna be enough,” but Kristen leans over the counter to playfully shove Jo’s shoulder, “I set the schedule, doofus. Which means we set the schedule. Trust me, you’ll get whatever you need. I’ve got to free up time to work the Sunshine.”
“Why?”
“They pay better.”
“How the heck many jobs do you have, anyway?” says Jo, but Kristen’s smirk has floated away, “You’re coming over tomorrow night, right?” she says.
“What?” says Jo.
“Doctor Europa! Bex says it’s on Netflix now or whatever. So stupid teevee party! Bex is coming, and Amy, we’ll get shit-faced on coolers, it’ll be just like high school. Come on.”
“Middle school, more like.”
“We didn’t get shit-faced in middle school.”
“He’s, ah,” Jo lifts her hand, “the one with the hat, right?”
“Doctor Europa and the fucking Pirates of Light, bitch! You had such the crush on Friedrich.”
“The hell I did,” says Jo.
“Language, ladies,” says the older woman, making her way back to the counter.
“Nobody’s here, Rae,” says Kristen. “You know we wouldn’t talk like that if anybody was here.”
“I’m here, Kirsten,” says the older woman. Jo looks up at that. Rae sets a folded polo shirt of periwinkle on the counter. “There you go,” she says. “That’ll come out of your first check.”
“To the tune of?”
“Forty-nine ninety-five.” She sets Jo’s license on top of the shirt.
“Kirsten,” says Jo, pointedly.
“Oh, it’s fine, you’ll never miss it. And it gives the place a certain, coherence, you know? Je ne sais quois. So. Tomorrow night?”
Jo, taking up the shirt, and the license, pauses, sighs, “Sure,” she says. “Kirsten. Why not.”
“Excellent!” says Kirsten, beaming, and then, with a shrug, “I mean, it’s like, what else you got to do?”
“On the Beach,” written by Eleanor Street, ©2005. The F--rie Handbook, edited by Carolyn Turgeon, ©2017. The Big Book of Oregon Ghost Stories, written by Janice Oberding, ©2022.
