A Day at the Beach - A Short Story

Alice walked three steps before she fully realized that she had stepped completely out of her shoes. She turned and walked back to them before she was aware that her t-shirt had likewise left her body.

The sidewalk was not particularly crowded, but there were plenty of people walking up and down that beautiful day. A cool breeze blew in off the ocean and the pier still carried many tourists out to Ruby’s for a tourist meal looking out towards Catalina Island. Alice covered herself with her arms the best she could and went back for her shirt, now lying on the ground.

A part of her mind was already working on the problem of how she could loose her shirt. The shoes were a possibility, but shirts don’t just fall off. Another part of her mind was shutting down in embarrassment. It wasn’t that she didn’t like the way she looked. Alice worked out at Lifetime Fitness gym three days a week. She looked good, bikini good. Somehow it was different being seen in a bikini top on the beach and being caught on the street in your bra.

Then she noticed that no one was moving. It wasn’t that they had all stopped to stare. No one was moving. No walking, no talking, no skateboarding or bicycling or cars or sound from Java Point coffee shop or anything. She stood quite still and slowly looked around. No one was moving.

With a sudden sweeping motion she bent and picked up her shirt and slid gracefully into it, pulling it down, tugging at the hem to test its security and then, as an afterthought, tucking it into her jeans. Which weren’t there.

A kind of mad feeling was growing somewhere inside, an “Am I going crazy” kind of fear. She spun back to where her shoes still lay and there between her and the shoes were her jeans. From somewhere far away she noted that they were still zipped, snapped and belted.

“It happens like that.” A voice came from nearby. “Hold still a minute. You haven’t completely synched up.” Alice looked around, but was not really registering her surroundings. She did not take the voice’s advice. A man’s voice, she thought in that part of her brain that was still trying to make sense of this. Picking up her jeans, she went to work on the fastenings. A young man stood up from a wire chair near a wire table. Others sat there as well, but they were not moving. No one was moving. Except the young man.

Well tanned and dressed in shorts and flip flops with a hood sweater, hair curled slightly and naturally and light in color. Not tall, but taller than Alice was. She was tall for a girl. He smiled a little and said, “Try to hold still.”

She held her jeans in front of her as he walked over and stepped past her a bit. He bent down and retrieved her bra from the ground. She looked down quickly and felt relief that her t-shirt was still on her body.

“Lotsa questions I know, but really, just hold still for a few minutes. It gets better. Trust me.” His voice was soft and he looked directly into her eyes. She was scared and trust did not always come easy for her, but her brain told her that maybe, this one time, she could trust a stranger just a little. Her brain told her that it did not have a clue as to what exactly was happening. The man in front of her wavered a little.

He didn’t waver back and forth, he wavered in her vision, as if she had lost his signal, like the cable TV went out for a moment or she went through a tunnel and her cell phone wavered. Alice squinted at him.

“Sorry, did I waver? It happens. If you move real slow you can try putting on your jeans. I’ll look up, but it’s best for me to be a little still right now too. So, I won’t turn around, I’ll just look up, okay?” He tilted his head back and squinted at the sunlight high in the sky. Slowly he lowered his sunglasses from the top of his head over his eyes.

Alice didn’t bother giving her approval. She did snatch her bra from his still outstretched hand. He wavered in her vision again.

“Slowly,” he said.

Slowly she slid the jeans on. “So, uh, what’s going on?”

“Don’t know, really.” He snuck a quick peek and looked back upwards when he saw that she was still buttoning her jeans. “Um, you might want to wait a while before you try putting on your uh, your,” Alice smiled a little as she noticed him actually blushing, “the rest of your clothes.” He finished with a slight stammer.

Alice went to put her undergarment in her purse and realized it was missing.

“Where’d my purse go?” she asked, turning about quickly. She spied it lying back a ways beyond where her shoes had been and started to walk that way.

“Wait!” She froze, but noticed that her shoes were no longer on her feet. A quick check to see that shirt and jeans were in place and then she let out a scream, “What is happening to me?”

“Please, just hold still! It gets better, I promise.” He moved slowly around in front of her again and handed her panties to her.

“Are you doing this?” Her voice became very intense and she directed it at the young man. “If this is some trick I’ll hurt you! I’ll kick you! I’ll punch you hard and I can! I’ve been practicing!” She had balled up her fists, one undergarment in each hand and was threatening him.

“No, no! It’s not a trick, really!” His voice in turn was pleading. “I’m stuck here just like you are! Have been for a while. Like I’m in between, we, we’re in between. It’s like time stopped, sort of, I don’t know, really I don’t. It’s not my fault. Please. Just hold still a bit. I’ll tell you what I know.” Alice was still feeling a little crazy and knowing that her clothing might…well it wasn’t falling off exactly.

“Why won’t my clothes stay on?” she demanded.

“You’re phasing. It happens to everyone.” He seemed a little relieved that she was calming down. He raised his sunglasses back to the top of his head, pushing against his curly hair.

“What do you mean ‘phasing’? Who’s ‘everyone’?” Her eyes were narrowed, but she had lowered her fists.

“It’s a word I use. I don’t have any idea really what is happening. I just got the word from a Star Trek show or somewhere. I’ve been here, ‘in between’ a long time. Could you, could we just talk? Just calm like, you know, talk?” He patted the air between them with his hands. He looked tired and worried and a little like a puppy that had gotten lost. He actually hung his head.

“Sure, let’s talk.” Alice dropped the intensity in her voice. As long as she didn’t look around she could pretend that this was just another slightly clumsy attempt by some guy who wanted to meet her. If she looked around and saw that no one was moving…

“Let’s start with your name and then I’ll tell you mine, okay?” She ducked her head a bit until she caught his eye. He looked up and smiled. “And then you’ll tell me what’s going on, right?”

“Right! I’m Charles.” He stuck out his hand. Alice smiled at the weird formality of it, but returned the gesture and said, “I’m Alice.” When their hands touched she felt as if she would faint. Charles quickly got his arm around her shoulder and helped her to a seated position on the sidewalk exclaiming, “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” over and over.

“I forget about that part. Look, as best as I can figure out, somehow time has kinda stopped for me here. It’s like I fell between the seconds or something and I’m always here, in the ‘now’. Every now and then someone else sort of falls between too. Until they completely adjust, it’s like their possessions don’t quite follow their movements. It freaked me out for a while when I first, uh, arrived or whatever. I kept running around and suddenly I was streaking. After a while it stops happening, but you gotta take it slow.”

“So why did I feel like I was passing out when we touched?” Alice looked a little pale.

“Um, you weren’t grounded,” Charles said dubiously, “or something. Look, I don’t have any science answers here. I call things what sounds right to me. So I think when I touch one of the newbies it’s like they get pulled further into this, um, the Between.”

“Great. So now I’m here and I can’t get back?” Alice was rethinking slugging him.

“No, people go back all the time. As far as I know I’m the only one who can’t get back.” His voice got soft. Alice liked his eyes.

“Blue,” she said.

“No, I’ve gotten used to it.”

“No, my favorite color. It’s blue, like your eyes.” She was flirting and she didn’t know why. Charles blushed. “So, what do you do for fun in, uh, in between?”

“Well, for one thing, everything is open and everything is free. But it’s no fun going to a movie. The actors just stay still like, well,” he waved his hand around indicating the people staying still on the street around them. “Do you want a latte? I can make one of those for you. I learned how.”

“Sure. So the coffee makers work, but everyone is frozen?”

“It is weird, but things seem to work fine if I’m near them. Just not people. Or animals. Here, can you stand okay? Let’s walk slow. We gotta use Java City, ‘cause Starbucks is too crowded. I can get cars to work and I watch TV a lot over at Circuit City. Not broadcast, but DVD’s. They’ll probably be pissed at all the movies I’ve opened up, but I’m not stealing them. I’ve borrowed some box sets from Barnes & Noble, but I always put them back. We could watch a movie if you want.”

“Charles, this is really strange and you’re what? Asking me to go with you to a movie?” Alice was having a hard time again. Charles had walked behind the counter and began making her a latte. Two girls were back there with him engaged in a frozen conversation. One had her hands spread out and appeared to be saying something like “As if!” while the other blew a bubble with her gum.

Charles turned back to Alice and saw where she was looking. “Sometimes I think about popping her bubble.”

“Why don’t you?”

“Karma.”

“What?”

“You know, karma. If I pop her bubble maybe something bad will happen to me.”

“I don’t really think that karma works that way and you’re trapped between seconds. What could be worse?”

“Oh, it’s not really that bad. At first maybe, but I’ve gotten kinda used to it. Just gets lonely, that’s all. Sorry about the movie invite. It’s been a long time since,” he paused a while looking into her face, “since a girl was here. Never in fact. Just some older women and some guys. Most of them freak out right away and never get over it. I do my best to get them to slow down and just stay still, you know, live in the moment. They get scared, like they’re gonna miss something if they don’t get back. I try to tell them, nothing will change, but they’re in a hurry mostly.”

“I’m scared. A little.” Alice took a breath. “I am, I’m scared Charles. This is not normal. People don’t just stop moving or have their clothes,” she pushed her lips together in frustration, “People's clothes don’t just ‘phase off’ their bodies!”

“Actually everyone is still moving, just real slow. And don’t be scared. I’ll help you get back.”

“How?”

“Well, I’m not sure how it works, but I think if you don’t get too used to being between you don’t actually sync up completely. One day you just sort of speed up or maybe it’s slow down and then you’re back.”

“How do you know?”

“Roger.”

“What?”

“Roger, over there.” Charles pointed to a man that was standing near a surf board display on the sidewalk. “He was my best friend for a while. He knows the lyrics to like every song. Then one day he just went back. I still talk to him sometimes.”

Alice looked at Charles with narrowed eyes. “You talk to him?”

“I like when you do that, with your eyes. You have nice eyes. Warm, deep. It’s not like he talks back and I’m not crazy, like I think he hears me or something. Just lonely. I’ll probably talk to you when you go back, just talk.” He turned and started the steam machine, drowning out any further conversation. When he finished steaming the latte he turned and asked, “Are you hungry? I can get us some food. Later I’ll show you how to get a bed to sleep in, just let me know when you get tired.”

Alice sipped her drink. It was really very good and she told Charles so. “Well, I’ve had a lot of practice,” he responded.

“How long have you actually been between, Charles?”

“Don’t know really. It took me a while to kind of get a structure to life at first. There’s nothing to tell me the passing of time unless I wear a watch. They have some nice ones here and I wore some of them for a while, but the day just is always about two o’clock. I think it was six minutes to two when I first went between. Recently I heard a long droning noise. It took me a while, but I think it’s the clock across the street tolling the hour. I know it’s been a long time subjectively. I learned that word from a book in the library. I watched all of the episodes of Xena and Hercules and when I figured out how much time it took it was like three weeks or something. I’ve watched a lot more TV seasons since then. Maybe a couple of years. Maybe more. Once I drove to Chicago, once to Seattle. Gas pumps work. If I wait a bit and stand still and close to them. Get my ‘field’ around them or something. Sometimes the food on the grills is hot. Fruit in the stores stays fresh. My iPod works and my computer. Even the internet sometimes, like Wikipedia and stuff that is always the same. No e-mail though, no IM-ing."

Alice looked at him in disbelief. Years? She had things to do!

“I have things to do! I can’t stay here for years! I have to get moving! I have to get…” She realized that she was starting to scream again and struggled to gain control.

“Hey, it’s okay. It’s okay, it’s gonna be okay.” Charles’ voice was calm, his eyes sincere and the light in them helped her attain a level of steadiness. “C’mon, let’s get out of the surf shop and go to the beach for a while. It always helps.”

They walked out the door and turned left towards the Pacific Coast Highway. Charles walked right out into traffic. Alice had lived in Huntington Beach for about seven years and knew the rules about crossing PCH. You hit the button on the stop light three times and stand back and wait for the walk signal. Everyone used the walk signal. “Stop!” she screamed.

“It’s okay! Really, c’mon.” Charles danced in the road a little. “I’ll have to learn to be careful again if I get back, but really, everybody’s stopped. C’mon, you’ll feel better at the beach.” He turned and skipped a step and twirled and waved for her to follow. Alice stepped gently into the flow of halted traffic.

Together they walked down the steps near Duke’s restaurant and around a low wall onto the wide, nearly empty beach. It was a weekday, Wednesday, and it was late in the season, September in fact, and it was the latter part of the month and it was around two o’clock and Alice fixed all these things in her mind as she walked past a volleyball game. A muscular young man was frozen in a futile dive towards a ball that was hitting just inside the line. A plume of sand rose around him arcing from his feet into the air. The sand hovered above the beach. His teammate, a young woman, was frozen in a posture of dismay, her face contorted in a state of denial. Her mouth was open and it looked like she was saying, “Noooooooooo…” It looked like she had been saying it for a long time. On the other side of the net another young woman, pretty with hair so blond that it was almost white, was jumping in the air, hands and arms raised in victory. She wore a pretty knit cap pulled down tight over her head and her hair wisped out from the edges. She wore a pink bikini and Alice noticed an onlooker staring at the girl. Her partner was just landing near the net, his arms still raised from the volley return, his face opening up in a way that revealed that same sense of victory. It was a scene of action and movement and nothing was happening. They were frozen in the state of defeat and victory.

Alice felt a hand on her arm and jumped a little. She had also stopped and was staring at the tableau. Charles' hand pulled her along. “C’mon,” he urged her quietly and she allowed herself to be led away.

They got to the water’s edge and Charles stood in front of her. Taking her face in his hands he looked very intensely into her eyes. “You need to release some energy. It will help. It always does and I don’t know why. Screaming is good. Try screaming.”

Alice didn’t need any prodding. She let loose a scream right then. Charles fell backwards. Alice kept at it, stopping only for breath and then not that often. She did aerobics and had good lung capacity.

As she screamed she felt the tension draining away. The ocean had been frozen, waves neither rising nor falling. Out about forty yards a surfer was just getting to his feet as he caught a wave. A little farther away another was wiping out. As Alice screamed, the water near them lapped a little in small ripples and waves. A soft sound came to her ears, like the sound of the ocean in miniature. No other sounds were heard. Alice sat down in the sand.

Charles had settled in and had been calmly waiting for her to finish. “Thanks,” Alice said, “I feel better. That probably wasn’t all that pleasant for you though, sorry.”

“Nah, I kinda liked it. I don’t get to hear many living noises.” He stared out at the sunlight sparkling off the little waves. Further out the waves remained still. They sat in silence for a while. Alice’s stomach growled.

“I can’t be hungry, I just had lunch.” She made a show of patting her stomach as she turned and looked at Charles for the first time since she screamed.

“No, it’s been a while,” he said matter of factly, “maybe five, maybe six hours.”

“No, it can’t have been that long. I don’t believe that. I don’t sit still that long. You must be wrong.” She protested and chided him for a moment and then Charles said, “Look at your watch.” Her watch read seven thirty nine pm.

When she had finished screaming again Charles said, “So, are ya hungry?”

They established a little pattern over the course of her first days ‘between’.

Charles found her a house that she liked; one that he knew was a vacation home over on Seventh Street and near Pecan. It was clean and there were new sheets and blankets. He taught her how to stand still near the shower head until the water started to flow. It took a couple of days for the temperature to regulate, but eventually she learned to step in and out and not turn the water off. Charles explained that it was probably a good idea for her to remain near where she had first fallen through. They went to her apartment to get some clothes and personal items. The day was beautiful and endless and they spent a good deal of time near the beach and walking the pier and eventually she took him up on the invitation to a movie.

Charles was a good companion. He cooked and walked and helped and talked and listened. He listened really well. He looked at her while she spoke and asked her questions and encouraged her to share her innermost thoughts. He constantly assured her that she would get back, that she wasn’t missing anything, that nothing was happening without her. He would get a little wistful look when he spoke like that and Alice could see the loneliness of his future. He let her pick out a movie one day, night, moment…they were never able to decide what to call the time that they were at. Alice had tried for a while to keep track of days, but that fell apart quickly. There was just no point.

She chose “Somewhere in Time” with Christopher Reeves, a time travel romance tale. It was the first time they kissed. After that Charles let her pick out the movies most of the time, she usually chose ones that he wouldn’t watch on his own. They watched the entire set of Tracey and Hepburn romantic comedies and he stayed the night, day, sleep period.

Charles was younger than Alice. He was not very focused on his life and when she asked him what he was going to do with his future, he just stared off and shrugged. Alice was very focused and had many irons in the fire of her career building. Sometimes she would open her day planner and review the appointments that she was going to have to keep eventually. Charles would just laugh a little. It was always the same day. He wasn’t the kind of person she would ever have dated before.

They drank good wine. They had fires on the beach. They went to museums and gardens and the library. Once they were at the central library long enough that one of the fountains started to splash. Charles looked at her with tears in his eyes.

It happened steadily. They realized it quickly and Charles rushed Alice back to the spot where they first met. She realized how much she loved him and tried to tell him so, but he would have none of it. She would move on and there was no guarantee that they would ever see each other again. Well Charles would see her, but that was it, they would never be together.

She had so many questions for him at that point. What did he want her to do? What was he going to do without her? Who was actually leaving who? How can she help him? How can he get back to where life was real? She was angry that she had not thought to ask these things before. She was angry with Charles because he didn’t seem to want to return with her…and then the clock finished striking two. A car alarm blared nearby and the clatter of a skateboard swiftly approached. The ocean roared and the traffic roared louder. Over head a plane roared and nearby a man roared in laughter. Everywhere people began to move and talk and gesture and laugh and yell and the cacophony was overwhelming.

Alice stood still in the middle of the sidewalk for a moment and then moved quickly towards the beach. She ran down the steps that she and Charles had walked up and down countless times. She ran to the beach and saw the well worn tracks of their foot prints leading past the volleyball game to the sea. She saw that the game had continued and the girl in the hat was diving for the ball now and everyone was laughing and shouting, urging her to success or failure depending on which side of the net they sat. The sand that she kicked into the air fell back to the beach.

Alice hurried to the water’s edge and saw the waves crashing regularly onto the shore. The surfers had all paddled back out and were waiting for the next wave. Some were paddling into an oncoming swell. It was quieter here, but the noise of the ocean filled her mind. She felt like screaming. Instead she wept.

Re-entry back into life was difficult. All the appointments that she had made for that day were cancelled. She lost a big sale that day and nearly lost her job. Her boss called her in later that week and told her that she had lost her edge, that she needed to tighten up her act and get her momentum back. He just didn’t understand what happened to her and she agreed.

It didn’t help that she opened her planner and found several long letters from Charles in different pages. Each had numbers on it and there were instructions that she should read them once a week or perhaps once a month. She read them all in one night. Later that week she opened the trunk of her car and found a packet of letters there as well. She went home and searched her closets and drawers and found letters from Charles hidden in many places.

She was hurt and she was angry. How could he do this to her? Why would he create these constant reminders of their inability to be together? Why would he treat her this way? She read every word he wrote.

He had looked into her eyes for a long time after she returned. He had kissed her gently. He had talked to her many times and then decided to write her letters. He had lived in Chicago for a while and then in Atlanta. He had returned to live in Portland and Seattle and many places on the coast and in the desert and in the plains and mountains and every now and again someone would fall between and he would always help them. He had traveled to Mexico and then down through Central America. He had lived for a while in the Andes Mountains and it was there that he had regular contact with people for it seemed they could step in between whenever they wanted to. He would go back there some day and see if he could learn to return. And then one day she could find no more letters.

After the second week of being back, she started to hit her stride again. The tears stopped flowing as constantly and the drive to succeed returned. She had stopped at the place on Seventh and Pecan and there, wrapped nicely, was the clothing and books and papers and anything that belonged to her that she had moved into the dwelling. A note on the top read, “I turned off the shower.” Alice laughed at that, for the first time since…since she had seen Charles last. His letters told her that he had done so much, lived so many experiences. It had only been a short time from her perspective. He seemed to have grown so much. She started to feel happy for him.

She rarely visited the beach after that and she moved from her small apartment into a house she purchased further inland. She was promoted and headhunted and made an offer and she negotiated and got stock options and a package and within a short period of time had achieved everything she had set out to achieve.

Two years later she was invited to a business luncheon at a restaurant next to the pier in Huntington Beach. The man sitting across from her was very high powered and spoke of goals and profits and retirement at thirty seven. He looked Alice in the eyes only occasionally and when he proposed to her, he couched it in the terms of a merger and used words like synergy and paradigm. Alice said she would take the offer under advisement and really did not know exactly what she meant by that. He shook her hand and gave her a peck on the cheek as the valet pulled his car around. He tipped them the exact percentage and drove off.

The valet stood patiently by as Alice looked in her small purse for her ticket. She stopped and excused herself and said she would return in a little while. All through the meal she had watched the waves of the ocean from their table on the veranda. She walked out onto the pier and all the way to the end.

A pod of dolphins had attracted the attention of a group of tourists. She watched them for a while and stood very still. Slowly she became aware of an elderly man standing quite close to her. She turned and he smiled. His eyes were her favorite color.



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