Leaving

The boy arrived at the beach for prom weekend, his friends and his hopes of drunken debauchery and freedom in tow. He had been accepted into a fine college already, stretching smiles across his parent's faces. They dreamed.

Their son, with his hair slicked back gets into a fancy sports car and drives to his massive office, where he moves millions with hand gestures.

The boy's thoughts stretched forward in time to college, where he would learn business in cavernous lecture halls from shriveled professors. He thought of these things while consuming alcohol and engaging in intercourse and swimming. Sometimes while his friends participated in liquid absorbtion competitions he would look out the window at the waves as they climbed up onto the shore and dragged the beach backwards with them. Beyond them he saw ships stocked with sailors bound for shores just beyond the fog of distance. The boats, like rickety bridges between them braved the swirling storms of tides and currents beyond the horizon. As he saw this he felt the waves pulling his spirit out into the open ocean.

That night he took part in an orgy of vomit and other bodily fluids and fell asleep beneath a pile of bodies. He listened to them breathing together like a single enormous organic being. Eventually his eyelashes drew together and met. He dreamed.

In a classroom, he takes notes from a chalkboard and swallows the paper on which he writes them. His mouth is dry. Suddenly the windows burst and seawater floods into the room, filling it. As the water rises to a dooming level, the boy struggles to escape it, flailing appendages in many directions. Stopping, he floats upward motionless, and inhales as much as he can.

When the being comprised of his companions awoke, its many eyes could not find the boy. It stretched its tentacles across the beach, probing for him. After a time it departed from the beach, and the boy was deemed lost.

The boy had boarded a boat in the early morning, leaving the shore to whither in the ocean mist. He was a grain of sand or a pebble now, tumbling into the water. The smell of the sea filled his lungs with new passion, which he left to the waves and the wind to direct.