Reed and I stand in the sand under a sky of shooting stars. They’re actually shooting, it’s the Persids. They happen every year at this time. I’m sure anyone, anyone with an ounce of sense, could see us standing out here and clock us as rolling right now.
A man who can only be described as Guy Fieri-core walks by and stares, I can’t help myself and call out, “Just two women, holding hands and standing barefoot in the soft white sands of Tulum. We are literally two grown human women wiggling our feet in sand and that’s okay!”
I feel as though I’m skating my bare feet through the sand to the lounge chair as I watch the waves come in, crash, and creep up the sand only to be sucked back out over and over again.
Once on a bender of a Koreatown Karaoke night, Reed got up and began to sing Bryan Adams’s “Heaven” but she used this deep singing voice to sing. Everyone in the room stopped talking and watched her. The voice that came out of her mouth sounded like a combo of Kermit the Frog and Stevie Nicks. It was shocking but not entirely bad.
Every time Reed got up to sing we anticipated her voice switching from her normal sweet-sounding voice to a weird Kermit/Stevie vibrato sound and she never let us down. For some reason these waves remind me of that voice.
“Hey, Reed? I love the beach. Are we going to dance class in the morning?”
“Of course we are.”
Reed lays back in her lounge chair. And I imagine her laying on the chair as it is folded into the sand, into the earth and vanishes.
“It’s the lithium in the air. That’s why you love the beach. You love drugs. Makes sense,” she says, “can we go to a Cenote?”
“What’s that?”
“An underground cave with water.”
“Of course.”
I have no idea what she’s talking about as the Molly heat flashes up my body again and I sink deeper into my chair.
I look down the beach and see a man about half a mile north of us.
I suddenly became MacGyver. Was there a female equivalent? Hermione? God, I love Harry Potter, but I can’t start thinking about Harry Potter right now. I stop myself; once I start, I’ll never get out.
“Look, a person is coming.”
Reed sits up and looks down the dark beach to make out the figure in the darkness.
“There’s definitely a figure. Looks bottomly.”
I look at the figure; indeed, they look bottomly.
“I don’t think bottomly is a word.”
“It isn’t?’
“No. But that is a pretty good descriptor.”
The dark figure, shaped like a pear, is moving closer towards us.
“Bottomly is getting closer.”
Suddenly the bottom divides, the figure splits into two pieces, and I can make out that it is a man, a man carrying a saxophone.
“There’s a saxophone on the beach.”
The man stops walking down the beach, lifts the sax into the air and begins to play.
The heat in my body rises above me and blankets me with a layer of heaviness.
The sax is crying a sad Latin love song.
On the beach, in the darkness, the sound of the saxophone like every wish I’ve ever made is coming true.
“Should I request “Careless Whisper’?”
From nowhere another man appears. He wears a colorful shirt and white dress pants that look tailored. He must be fifty years old. He reeks of Gen X ennui.
“Are you ladies lost?”
TO BE CONTINUED
“He reeks of Gen X ennui! 🔥🔥🔥
“He reeks of Gen X ennui..”
I mean... 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼