Anywhere by the Sea

by Francine Witte

Cristian Palmer

Grab of waterfingers under your toes and horizon sailboats. This could be anywhere but it’s not. It’s not your ice cream ocean from when you were nine, and your mother held a towel around you as you wriggled into dryer clothes. Not the goodbye sand when Bobby Epstein kissed you one last twilight time, his face lit up by the bonfire collapsing, snapping, and Julie Mitchell’s face lit up sudden behind him.

Now, the sea creeps deeper, up around your ankles. Washy and warm for April. Light seeping out of the five o’clock sky. All of it going older and you can’t make it stop. This could be anywhere but it isn’t. You think how every shore everywhere has to look the same. Combination of boats and sand and half-built castles. Maybe an ice cream stick here and there. Up above, the sky, the same combination of blue and whisper of waiting moon, and you, with the tide reaching high as your knees, collection of cells and eyelashes and memories, same as everyone, anywhere, standing there, feeling the slightest bit of undertow, and knowing how easy the tide could pull you in if you let it.

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Francine Witte’s flash fiction has appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, Mid-American Review, and Passages North. She has stories upcoming in Best Small Fictions 2021, and Flash Fiction America (W.W. Norton.) Her latest books are Dressed All Wrong for This (Blue Light Press), The Way of the Wind (AdHoc fiction,) and The Cake, The Smoke, The Moon (ELJ Editions). She is flash fiction editor for Flash Boulevard and The South Florida Poetry Journal. She lives in NYC.