Descent – Part 1
The warm water lapped against her ankles as she strode along the beach with her companion, but the storm raging in her mind wouldn’t allow her to notice the soothing tide. Normally, she relished the ease with which the waves caressed the shore. On this particular night, however, her mind was too full of other emotions to even give peace a chance. She had noticed the trembling in her hands earlier and had placed them in her pockets as she hunched her shoulders and walked into the warm breeze.
The beach seemed empty. They had been walking for at least twenty minutes, and hadn’t seen another person in ten. A lone catamaran cast a long shadow across their path. To her left, she could see the glow from the streetlights peeking over the sea oats and even heard the distant cars on the road. As they walked further, the lights dissipated, the road coming to an end. The moon was the only source of light that illuminated their path. The pale, white orb shone dimly in the black sky as the only eye that watched over them.
She had been on this beach a number of times before, though she had rarely walked this far down. There had been unorganized events held by other people in her school. On various occasions, she and her friends had stumbled upon these parties. They were your normal high school weekend gatherings, celebrations of adolescence with a lot of alcohol, some marijuana, and nubile, teenaged bodies pressed together, writhing in the sand like epileptic Siamese twins. After stumbling upon one of these parties for the first time, she and her friends always went looking for more. Only on a handful of other occasions did they find one. More often than not, the police had broken them up before they had even gotten going. Now, the only other things that moved on the beach were her, her companion, and their shadows, faint in the moonlight, faithfully following behind them. There were no kegs to be seen. No drunken teenagers. No couples making love like grunions in the sand. It was just them. And though he was there, she felt utterly alone.
This is an excerpt from Descent by Steve McAllister. Buy the eBook now!
