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Vapour cumulonimbus rolled over the horizon, billowy and soft and white. Beneath laid evergreen fir and pine trees with wild depths. Bees and butterflies danced around wildflowers and black eyed susans along the roadside that crept into ditches, dank with plantrot. Rachel and Chloe spent wet rainy days in the springtime in those ditches, catching frogs and minnows and pocketing elephant ear bulbs to plant in her fathers lawn. Those bulbs had sprouted seemingly overnight, just the week before. Large leaves erupted infectious and green and heart shaped dripping with dew.
Now, it was summer, and they were driving the scenic route to the beaches. Rachel's hair tussled and tangled in the wind. Her forearm was stretched out of the passenger's window of Chloe’s old Ford, palm buffeted by wind and fingers slowly moving along the breeze. She was half lidded and languid, she didn't even consider the bugs or the rocks or grit that could graze her palm. She didn't think about camphor trees in Lebanon scorched black by wild fires; bees with broken wings or really anything at all. The air wasn’t miserable and hot like how she’d remembered in her childhood, instead it honeyed against her skin and her nose and the air smelled sweet like gardenias and honeysuckles instead of the dead possum they passed by two minutes ago.
Rachel looked to her left at Chloe and couldn’t even fight her old desire of appearing esoteric and stone faced to others, she just smiled. She was only sixteen now, but the freckled skin around her eyes will turn into crows feet with age later, remembering days like this with Chloe forever.
Later, they walked along the gritty beachlines of the three graces together, beachcombing for treasures and seashells and sea glass. Sea oats whistled nearby and black oystercatchers lurked, their feathers ebony black. Rachel could see the red lighthouse in the distance, standing over the steep cliffs yonder. Spanish moss on live oak trees seemingly beckoned goers into their gray woods, like sad old lonely men.
‘’Look what I’ve found,’’ Chloe had bound up to Rachel, bearing marbles and remnants of sea critters cradled in her pale palms. Looming were bluepurple seagrass veins along her wrists and upward her forearms and old white criss cross scars from long ago. Rachel thinks of the wet sounds the veins would make if she were to rip them out.
They made matching bracelets with the cowrie shells they’d collected when they were at home, drinking fruit punch from glass bottles that stained their mouths wet red. Rachel ordered a stylophone on her laptop that evening.
Horsefresh grass danced and lilac petals bloomed and blossomed and moved in the breeze that night as they slept.