Umbrellas and Seagulls

It is cold. A dry wind whips through the harsh terrain like a bull in the Corrida de Toros, enraged into a frenzy, howling out battle cries, terrible screams ever louder in the winter air, as it rattles the ground and shakes giant evergreens that sway like performers on stilts. It carries in its icy maw a whiff of pines and upturned earth and the promise of death. A scavenger-bird, starved by winter, caws in distress, fluttering and flapping, as it is carried off by a fierce gust, leaving behind only a scattering of footprints: a set of alphabet magnets, all the letter Y, stuck to a white refrigerator wasteland.

A clown of a traveler, white-faced and red-cheeked, scuffles his feet as he desperately struggles to take shelter under a large umbrella from the bitter breeze, a frigid mole that, with every panting breath, burrows deeper into his throat and lungs, filling his mouth with ice and snow, a cold sweetness to mix with the salty snot that runs down from his frost-bitten nose. He plods out nine steps. Each is slow and deliberate, requiring more effort than the one prior, and sounds as does an apple being bitten by horse. At the end of his trek, after harnessing every throe of hidden strength, he crumples under the shadow of his now-snow-covered umbrella and assumes the fetal position, frost-bitten and hallucinating.

The black umbrella above the traveler grows larger and larger until becoming an overhang of dark obsidian, wet and barnacle-ridden on the ocean shore, carved out by a relentless tide. Waves crash on seaweed-covered rocks sending cool ocean spray over his back. Gulls call out like children in a game of tag carried by an ocean breeze that chills the droplets of water that cling to his naked body. He shivers and looks into the cloudless sky at the birds circling above him, each flapping body a transforming glyph that cycles between M’s, and Y’s, seeming to ask the silent question, “Um, why?”

photo by Juan Riera