Gritty by Anna Evans
It is six o’clock on a Sunday morning in early June.
I am sitting on the heavy shale above the high tide line on Brighton beach,
with my knees clasped to my chest. I look at the sea, then at my knees. The
sea is grey and flat; my knees protrude oddly beyond the red velvet mini-skirt.
I have not slept; my head does not belong to me. It is as separate as the
seagulls which swoop and shriek above me. My eyes are gritty and it is not
the sand. There is no sand, except for that in my eyes.
“Are you all right, love?” says an old lady out walking her
dog. The dog is a grey miniature poodle, small and eager to please. I am
startled by the contrast between its steel wool hair and shiny pink tongue.
“I’m fine,” I say.
But of course that is a lie, the kind of lie young women in red velvet mini-skirts
tell to old ladies who come across them on beaches the world over.
I am not fine; I have not slept.
Last night I…
I look at the sea. There are boats on it, fishing boats perhaps. The pier
stretches out into the water, a bony finger pointing away from England.
My mouth is dry and leathery like shreds of rolling tobacco. We rolled joints
last night. I must have smoked a thousand regular cigarettes, some mine,
some bummed from other people. Then I went on to smoke pot, which made me
giggle; I had not realized how funny it could be, to be bad.
I run my tongue experimentally around my parched lips; it finds little flaps
of skin which hang loose. I slice them off with my teeth.
It isn’t funny now.
I had drunk too much, of course, before the pot: the salty tang of margaritas,
tumblers of bad, improperly chilled wine, blended whisky from the bottle.
As though it has only just remembered the alcohol, my head begins to thump
like the bass beat in the night club we went to, the club where I met the
boys.
Last night I…
This is a recipe for trouble: alcohol, pot and a red velvet mini-skirt.
I stand up. I have been sitting there for an hour and my knees are stiff.
I can feel something else beyond that stiffness – the sore places on
my inner thighs. I know why they are sore. The skirt is ruined; there is
a burn hole where someone dropped a careless cigarette upon it. Later I will
find a matching round pink scab on my thigh. The skirt is stained too; something
has spilled onto the material and stuck the nap of the velvet up like a brush.
I smell the dank odor of seaweed, but is it rising from me or from the ocean?
I remember the boys, one by one in the dingy bed and breakfast: their scratchy
hands, their urgent mouths. They were all younger than me.
I won’t do that again, I think.
I get in my car and drive home at forty miles an hour, my shaking hands
gripping the wheel and my blurred vision fixed on the highway.
It is 1994 and I have not yet realized I am an alcoholic.
It is not the last time.
Anna Evans
Anna Evans was born in England in 1968 and tried several careers including
Chemical Engineering, Marketing and Design before her daughters, now aged
5 and 7, were born. She came to the United States with her family in 2000
when her husband was transferred here and they have just been granted permanent
residency. She has been writing poetry for many years, and is president
of the Burlington County Poets in New Jersey, and a member of the
Quick And Dirty Poets. She has been published in the latest issues
of The Edge City Review and The Formalist, in
addition to forthcoming issues of The Edison Literary Review and
the Binnacle. She recently
won First Prize in the Twelfth Great Blue Beacon Poetry Contest.
Her story “Skins” won an Honorable Mention in the
2003 Byline Short Short Story Contest. The above story, “Gritty”, won
Second prize in the Fiction “Words on the Wall” contest
at the Philadelphia Writers’ Conference.
