Stumblingly

flash fiction

Simon Harsent, White Water, 2013

I'm going to go swimming, he thinks, and it's decidedly the least violent thought he's had all night so it's the one he's going to follow. Stumblingly, he stumbles, head over foot, cutting a path through the brush in the direction he's pretty sure the ocean lies. Going off instinct, salt air tickling his inebriation, cutting wind failing to cleave the liquor hearth in his tummy.

Stumblingly cannot be a word, he's thinking. Stumblingly. StumBlingLee—a good name for the man he'd just ditched at dinner. Something oafish in the made-up Stum, the sort of man who cannot carry a conversation beyond yeah and yeah? and oh, cool. Telling Stum, I'm a neurobiologist and Stum's stumped reply, nice, man. you wanna do a bump in the bathroom?

Miserable, that this is the best he can manage at the geriatric age of 34. This, just another in a series of horrible, soul-crushing dates in the past year. This, the fate of a divorced faggot with, fine, a drinking problem, but who doesn’t have a drinking problem? At least it’s not a coke problem, at least he’s a respectable addict. This, he finds funny as he ducks a low-hanging branch, tripping as the dirt gives way to sand beneath his feet. All at once, the canopy of trees ceases its overhead sprawl and the sky opens wide, the netting of stars pulsing and spinning above, a cloudless but also moonless night so he can’t see the obsidian sea but hears its hush and whisper against the shore.

He kicks off his shoes recklessly into the dark, thinking, I don’t care about my earthly possessions, I’m not like that. Stum, returning from the bathroom, wiping his nose with the back of his forearm then extending across the table to show off the Rolex pulling at the wiry little hairs on his wrist. Bling bling! This, he spent the next ten minutes talking about, most he’d had to say all night. The cost, his colleagues’ jealousy, how he doesn’t take it off during sex, the cost again. StumBling wearing himself out with all his rambling, said he needed another bump and asked him to pay the bill while he was away.

“I’m fucking better than that,” he says out loud to himself, fumbling in the dark toward the gentle sigh of the water. “I deserve better.”

“Do you?” the ocean seems to say, wielding the voice of a distant man.

He squints, peering into the dark but can’t make anything out. Some fucker standing in the water in the middle of the night?

“Yes?” he calls out.

“What do you deserve?” The voice asks. Something familiar in its steady, apathetic lilt.

He struggles out of his shirt, his pants, limbs heavy and disobedient, kicking up sand all over himself. “I, uh, I don’t know. I deserve a good man. Not that guy. Not StumBlingLee.” He laughs at himself. The more he says the name, the less he can remember the guy’s actual name, the uglier his face becomes in his mind’s eye. Like a caricature. This makes him feel better.

“Hm,” the voice sighs like a breaking wave. “You’ll always be cheated out of what is meant to be yours, is that it?”

His clothes litter the black beach. Thinking to himself whatever, he strips his underwear too, half-heartedly hard. Just needs to get laid. “Probably,” he says to the voice, deciding to be fearless in the presence of it, maybe wondering if the guy is cruising, if he’s about to get lucky. “I’m almost 35. Not respected by my peers. Divorced by a man who took everything from me. I have nothing and for no reason.”

“It’s a convenient thought, but you don’t really believe it.” The voice sounds closer now and he stumbles forward, reaching out for a warm body to fall into, instead plunging up to his ankles in the icy November ocean as it sloshes up his calves.

“Where are you?” he asks, chasing off the chill. Moving to stay in motion. Leaving the restaurant when it became clear that StumBlingLee would not be coming back from the bathroom. Lee-ving through the window. This doesn’t make any sense. Then the alcohol makes sense of it again. So he can smile.

“I’m here,” the voice says, all around. “I’m here and always will be here.”

He scoffs. How to get this guy to shut up and make him feel something. “Alright, dude, well I’m going swimming. You should join me if you wanna have fun.”

Still, he can’t make out any figure through the night which only seems to be deepening its darkness. “Oh, I’ll join you,” says the voice. “We can do it together.”

Okay, much better, he thinks, wading deeper, up to his hips, cringing at the cold. Much better than StumBlingLee. What the fuck was his actual name. Whatever.

“You behind me?” He calls out, curling around the flickering warmth of the rum in his tummy, confident this flame will sustain him.

“I’m here,” the voice says, again so familiar but so distant. “Whenever you’re ready,” it seems to hum against his ear. “I’ll follow you down.”

He grins. Not a pointless night, then. Useless StumBlingLee overdosed in the bathroom or went out the window, who cares. “I want it all,” he says to himself, slurring over the syllables, tongue slow in his mouth. “I deserve it all.”

The voice, embodied then, places a weightless hand on his shoulder and kisses his ear so lightly, it almost feels like nothing, or the memory of something. “Go ahead,” the voice says, sadly. “You do deserve it.”

He raises his arms above his head as if to dive, stumbles forward on legs numbed by cold and topples over, slips wholly into the dark, still ocean with two hands on his head pressing all the way down.