warsacomin

I wish I could tell a story about you. About that night on the island where we slipped out from the bunks and went tracing our palms over the tips of yellow grass growing just past the ocean’s grasp. We didn’t know each other, not really anyway, but you followed me and I pretended to be cool with the distance growing between us and the teachers, administrators, and how each step was one more we’d have to retrace if we needed a hasty retreat. Rocks grinding under our feet and the shimmer of Puget Sound crackled together, tapping some sleeping sense that drove us deeper into the dark malaise. Every time it felt we’d gone far enough I found myself still walking up and over the bends of the island's coast until we found footing on something flat and purposeful, designed by man.

What’s this?
I don’t know I said. Cement?
Well duh.

We found chain link and rebar. Fragmented walkways, jig saw side walks. You pulled out a flashlight.

Why’d you bring that?
To see.
Why didn’t we use it earlier? My knee burned from a scrape.
Didn’t want to be seen she said. Click. We had light. She dragged it behind me until I saw a gap in the island and stairs dug into the ground.

This is weird. I agreed. Bolder now, I started down them, stopping at a door, placing my hands on the smooth lead gray paint. It flaked under my fingernails.

Come on.
Okay. I bet its locked.

Then you were behind me, pushing as I pushed. The hinges cried, the door went forward and we found ourselves falling forward into the dark.

Where are we?
Can I have the flashlight? You refused. I stepped to the side of the door. Ladies first. You called my bluff. The flashlight groped all corners of the room; a simple cement box with one more door on its far side identical to the one we just pushed open save for one important detail; it was ajar. Puddles of water lined the narrow halls. I expected to hear mice scamper away from us but these rooms had no life, just a breeze, a tide of air coming and going, pulling faint whistles around the crumbling corners of aged cement.

Where’s the air coming from.
What? I didn’t understand.
The wind has to be coming from somewhere. Where?

We followed the flow. Sweat on my face and cheeks collected chills from it. At the end of a long hallway we found two more wet stairs that took us to a room shaped like an oriental fan, rounded at the far end, coming to a point at the entrance. It faced the ocean, the majority of its far wall a panoramic gap covering the north side of the island. We could see, even in the dark, the silhouettes of islands farther north, the starlight on the sound and the roll of white water coming in on the north beach. You turned the flashlight off. Peering over the edge of the gap we were some twelve feet above the rocks. I knew what this was.

This is so weird you said. Why is this here?

As a precaution I said. Something like that. Thank god you said nothing, thank god we did nothing but sit with our legs dangling out of the windows, our backs to rooms as still as coffins in the earth in this antique bunker; the kind of place that instills stillness, where men go when they accept doom and fear open sky. I always wondered what you were thinking then.

Eight years later I find the taste of that memory clashing with its clarity. Yet no grand finale and no one wiser for their troubles. Just loose recollections of shadows playing by the coast, your dark form cut against the blue night, stumbling and reaching for balance in unavailing memory.