Fragment #54 – 7 November 2014

When he was born his skin was blue and his father was convinced that something was wrong.  The doctor, tired from her fourteenth delivery that day, slapped the baby on its buttocks, it began to cry, and then colour spread quickly across its body.  Years later, when he would return home from the sea, shivering and blue, his father would remind him of this story, and threaten with good humour to smack the pinkness back into him.  Carlos, who rarely spoke, tended to smile and nod at this story, because its familiarity was comforting to him.

Once, while swimming, he pulled a metal plate from beneath some rocks.  At least he thought it was metal, but a little while later he showed his father, who said it might be silver.  They took it to be checked and it was, and on top of that it was old, much older than Carlos or his father had thoughts, and then it was announced that the beach area where Carlos swam would be closed indefinitely to check the area for further finds, and Carlos was unable to swim any longer.

* * *


Leave a Reply


You are commenting using your account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo


Twitter picture


Facebook photo


Connecting to %s