[ IP ] Imagination

There was the thought of sea, and a shore, of a lighthouse burning bright and a setting sun, of water crystal clear and teeming with fish, and in the distance a ship sailing to the open seas. Jonas held the bottle between his fingers, and with a sudden twist turned it lengthwise, the seas glistening just beneath the bottle's neck. 
 
 He held the bottle up to his eyes and looked through the prism of the glass. The sea and sky were painted in bright pastel colors, but the ship and the shore and the man standing upon it were a dead unknowable black. The scene sloshed, gleaming like a rainbow slick of gasoline. Jonas lifted the bottle to his mouth and breathed in a heady air. In that bottle was a child's hapless dream of the sea, seen through aquariums and storybooks and paintings. There was a lighthouse - the idea of a lighthouse - guiding nothing, shining through nothing, standing eager and self-satisfied at the sight of its own light. There was a fisherman, a shadow, a silhouette, standing erect like a prop on the rocky shoals of the shore. 
 
 And somewhere in there, in the black of a ship out at sea, was a dream of a memory of his father. 
 
 Jonas looked up at the setting sun and walked back into the woods, leaving the bottle unstoppered for the birds to twist their beaks in and drink.
