The Kite Flyers

[lavivi]

And now I have a BETTER story.  I know it is better, because it's already gotten feedback from The Great Muse, who is indeed a person.  And she has excellent taste and doesn't hesitate to tell me when something really is bad.

 

The Kite Flyers

The sand was dirty.  Not at all the gleaming white, or even off-white, you see in pictures, advertisements for vacations.  The beach was dark brown, and scattered with small stones and pieces of trash.  The sky was almost completely overcast – not many people out today.  It was almost deserted, in fact.  There was only the long expanse of dark sand and gray-blue waves washing over it.

 

            It was windy, too, which was another reason why the beach was unpopulated.  A boy sat beneath the stairs of the beach front store, arms crossed over his knees.  His hair was dark like the sand and tangled from the wind.  He liked to go down to the beach on weekdays, when there weren’t many people, when he was able to skip school.  His mother knew where he was.  She didn’t care where he was, as long as she knew how to find him.

 

            He was wearing a red shirt and jeans.  The jeans were threadbare at the knees, and the shirt had a small hole, just big enough to stick his thumb through, on the shoulder.  He always wore scruffy clothes to go down to the beach.  When he arrived, he had found a smooth stone on the bottom steps of the stairs, and was absentmindedly turning it over in his hands now.

 

            So far, he had only seen a few older, teenage boys show up in a pickup truck – skipping school too.  They had only stayed for about fifteen minutes, smoking and talking, then they drove off again.  The boy – his name was James – watched the seagulls flutter down and pick at the cigarettes left behind.

 

            But now something else was approaching – a blue SUV.  James turned his head and watched as it came onto the beach, moving slowly toward him, then coming to a stop.  After a moment, the doors opened and a girl and a boy, the boy his age and the girl younger, jumped out.  An adult followed, more slowly, under the weight of a lawn chair.  They weren’t wearing swim suits – the man was wearing pants, and the children shorts, which had to feel chilly in the weather, especially if they were going to go into the water. 

 

            The girl immediately set about doing exactly that – she ran straight into the waves, though dashing back before they hit above her knees.  She continued darting back and forth, holding a game to see how close she could get and not have her feet washed over by the smallest waves, while her father set up his lawn chair, facing the ocean, and sat down.  The boy had taken something plastic that was rolled up out of the car – as he unwound it and shook it out, James saw that it was a kite.  The bright yellow of it made him squint.

 

            The little girl continued to run down the shoreline, dancing in the waves and picking up seashells, returning to show them to her father, who sat in the lawn chair without a book or anything, staring into the waves.  He did turn to see the shells his daughter would hold up to him, and that seemed to please her well enough, for she left them in an offering by his feet.  The boy, working alone, straightened out his kite and with practiced skill launched it in the air. 

 

            James’s attention became centered on the kite flyer, and less on the girl and man.  The boy did look just his age, and even resembled him, to a degree – they had the same coloring.  James watched as he handled the kite with careful expertise, studying it in the air.  He looked very serious about it, as though the kite wasn’t just a toy.  His expression made James glance back at the man in the lawn chair, who was still staring off into the waves as though there were a television in front of him, and the girl who was getting farther away now, still playing with all her childish carelessness.  James looked them over again, and thought to himself that maybe they weren’t the stereotypical happy family visiting the beach after all.

 

            The yellow kite flew strongly in the gusty wind.  It was clearly taking all of the boy’s attention to keep it steady.  James watched as it dropped and swerved, trembled and held in place as though pinned there by an invisible force.  The particularly strong force of the wind that day made it shudder more than James usually had seen kites do, and for a moment James felt sorry for the kite – then he felt silly, and pushed the thought away.

 

            The kite’s tail, which was yellow and orange, was whipping back under the wind, looking strained.  James wondered a couple of times whether it might come off – and then it did.  In the blink of an eye, it snapped free from the high kite, fluttered and twirled free in the wind, and slowly made its way down – toward the stairs of the beach store and James.

 

            James watched it come toward him, feeling a little annoyed that he would be discovered now.  The tail sailed toward him, but above – it eventually came to settle under the top of the stairs, wrapped partially around one of the wooden poles that held up the store. 

 

            Almost without thinking, James dropped the stone in his hands and jumped up, climbing the stairs toward the kite tail, seeing out of the side of his eye the boy slowly reeling in his kite and walking toward him.  The house and stairs were old – the stairs had been rebuilt at some point, and the railings didn’t quite connect.  There was a gap in the railing from the top stair and the railing that went around the porch of the store.

 

            James crouched down at the gap.  He was a thin boy, and he was able to duck his head and squeeze through the gap.  Hanging onto the base of one of the wooden railings, he lowered himself down so he was almost upside-down.  He reached – couldn’t quite grasp the fluttering end of the kite tail – shifted, hooking his leg around another railing and moving his hand to grasp the rough edge of the wooden floor instead – and snatched it. 

 

            He pulled gently, and the tail came unraveled easily.  Gracefully James pulled himself back up onto the stairs and walked back down, to where the kite flyer was waiting at the bottom, holding the kite.

 

            “Thanks,” the boy said.  James gave a half-shrug and held out the kite tail.  The boy didn’t take it, however, but looked at him for a moment, and asked, “Want to help me tie it back on?”

 

            Taken by surprise, James didn’t respond for a few moments, but then he nodded.

 

            The boy took the kite to a nearby wooden table, and James held the kite end while the boy tied the kite tail back on, adding extra knots.  Then James went with him back onto the beach, watching as he let the kite back into the wind, the boy making a point to demonstrate how it was done.  Then, when the kite was at a stable height, he held out the spindle to him.

 

            “You do it.”

 

            Uncertainly, James took the ends.  He had never flown a kite before.  He immediately felt the tug, the constant pull of the kite in the wind in the spindle.  He looked up at it, fluttering high above him.  James tentatively held the spindle higher and lower, then, with the boy’s encouragement, let out more string.  The kite went higher and higher, but he always felt the pull in his hands, the pull to be released into the wind, like the kite tail had.

 

            Finally, the kite was just a yellow dot in the sky.  He looked up at it, straining to keep it in sight.  He could still feel the tug in his hands, even with the kite so very far away…

 

            “Go on,” the boy said.  Reluctantly, James looked at him, away from the kite.  The boy looked very serious.  “Go on.  Let it go.”

 

            James looked up at the kite, which was just a dot now, just a yellow dot, but the pull was the same as when he could see every detail, and he released the spindle.

 

            For a moment the yellow dot was there, and then it disappeared into the background of a gray cloud.  The boys stood, staring up into the sky, while the man gazed into the ocean and the girl played in the waves.

 

It now stands at 1,432 words. 

 

In other news, I revised this post about the three missing Death Eaters.  Added a few paragraphs, changed my theories.  Will now send it into the daily_snitch.

Comments

[calliopeia17.livejournal.com]

I'm really impressed! This is excellent writing, and very thoughtful. This is probably going to sound really odd, but I was most drawn to the girl playing in the waves- I used to do that all the time when I was little. I still do, actually. And it always reminds me of childhood, you know, of pretending that there's something coming after you, but you can always dodge out of the way.

And then I get older and I have dreams about doing the same thing, only the waves get bigger and bigger and closer and closer and I end up trapped against a wall and drwon.

But that's not the point. Anyway, though, water symbolism always really resonates with me because of that. Lovely writing.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_lavinia_/]

Thanks! Heh, you probably got a bad impression from the other story, though you've read Someone to Look Up To. I'm still waiting for a review from published!stepfather...

Yeah, I like to play in the waves like that too. Not go out too deep, just knee-height at the most, and at first dodging the smallest waves....