A bolt of lightning flashed across the sky, lighting up the beach into a ghostly daytime drained of colour. The sand was bone white and at this time of night the waves were almost completely black.
The beach at night was a wilder place. The sky merged with the black ocean. The white sand sprung out of the dark treeline. The whitewash looked somehow lit up as if from the inside by a magical force. The dark waters washed in and out of the shore like a metronome, hypnotic.
A trio of ravens landed on the sand nearby. Or were they seagulls disguised by the darkness? A murder of crows, Michael decided. The birds picked at a tangle of seaweed draped over an arrangement of coral that looked like a skeleton on the beach.
"Are they... Crows?" Kobie asked.
"I think so."
"What are they doing here?" Kobie's face was scrunched up in the dark, watching the crows, worried.
"Maybe they're here for a romantic night time stroll?" Michael said.
"Weird time for a bird to be at the beach don't you think, weird kind of bird too."
"Says the weird girl at the beach."
In the three weeks they'd been dating, Micheal Steadfast had already learned three things about Kobie Brennan:
A) She liked the sound of crashing waves. She liked to watch them, building up excitement, squeezing his hand and widening her eyes in expectation until the moment they were about to crash and then squealing in delight when they did.
B) She hated stand-up comedy, community theatre and people singing to her in intimate one-on-one settings.
C) Her feet didn't feel pain, they were big and strong with skin as thick and protective as shoe leather. The first time they went to the beach together Kobie had ended up carrying Michael over a stretch of flat rocks where the rain and waves had eaten away the surface to a pattern of sharp craters that were painful for him to walk on.
In the same time that Michael had learned all this about Kobie, in the last week, he had learned something about himself too:
A) He liked Kobie Brennan, a lot.
Kobie had said she wanted to see the place where the cliffs met the ocean. The cliffs cut you off from walking any further unless you were game enough to swim out into the chaos of the water. Into the waves, which threw themselves over the headland, exploding over the rocks, dying, trickling back into the ocean to regroup. Kobie wouldn't be crazy enough to swim, surely. But she'd probably get as close as she could to the edge of those rocks.
Michael pulled gently on Kobie's hand. If they kept their pace up they could reach the cliff face before it started raining.
He breathed in deeply. You couldn't smell the rain in the air yet. But he could taste a whiff of rotten seaweed. He glanced back at the crows picking at the glistening green like a corpse. The rotten smell wasn't bad. It was that good fermentation stink. like soya sauce or Thai green curry. The air smelled alive: their sweaty bodies, a stinging salt breeze, the bright zest of the ocean and the wind that whipped through their hair, mixing it all together.
The sky lit up with another flash of lightning. What had been the occasional flash every five minutes or so was now only separated by about a minute's darkness.
Kobie glanced furtively in the direction of the flash.
"I thought you liked storms" Michael teased.
"I do!" Kobie said, "Just not while we're on the beach."
They had to almost shout over the roar of the ocean. When Kobie turned back to him, his pulse quickened at the sight of her open mouth and her teeth, glowing in the pale light of the toenail moon.
YOU ARE READING
Feathers
Paranormal*** COMPLETE *** After a freak accident, Michael is left with dark visions that he's too embarrassed to tell his girlfriend about. But what if they're not all in his head? A novel about love, trauma and friendship. About the things we hide from th...
