A Little Short Story: GLORY DAYS IN A POST-HISTORIC WORLD

<3 With special thanks to Toto, for calling me his muse and asking me to tell him a story...

GLORY DAYS IN A POST-HISTORIC WORLD
　

An original work by Aurelia Blue    

Axl and Aurelia had gotten old. And old was not for the faint of heart. Or as Axl liked to put it, “Old, is not for young people.” He was playing off his mother saying, “Babies aren’t for old people,” seven decades ago when she’d kept their son, Lio, for the day. How funny, and admittedly, annoying, that had seemed to the exhausted young parents. But they had laughed it off, as they were inclined to do. After all, they had no intention of ever getting old. Time had done it’s work though, and now they sat on a pier overlooking the water which seemed timeless.

“Drink looks good today,” Axl said. “No algae.”

“No bodies,” Aurelia laughed.

“No, not even any nasty little bird bodies,” Axl laughed, “just blue, blue, blue.”

They held hands as they gazed out as far as their eyes could follow the vast azure pool where the sun hovered like a runny egg ever closer to the surface. This was their favorite time of day, watching as the egg slowly sank into the edge of the world and boiled into the who-knew-what abyss. Where it went was of no real importance to them, as it was its departure that held the significance, signaling the end of one more day accomplished in this life.


“You cold?” He moved now to cover her with the quilt.

“No, love, I’m just right,” she replied with a shiver.

“You look cold.”

“No, no, just enjoying the sunshine and the breeze. It always gives me a shiver. Happy shiver,” she answered giving him a reassuring smile as she ran her hands over the frayed borders of each bit of embroidery that held the whole thing together. A crazy zig of a stitch, a bold zag of a color unfolded like Braille telling the story of her life beneath her fingers.

“I’d forgotten Lio liked over-alls,” she said quietly.

“Oh yeah,” Axl said now, “loved ‘em. Wore a pair everyday right through the fourth grade.”

She laughed. “And brought them home for patching every day right up through the fourth grade. Oh, he was so hard on clothes! I was always so glad when summer came and we’d come up here all the time. He’d just wear out swim trunks for a few months.”

“The kids liked it here.”

“We liked it here,” she turned toward him with a mischievous grin. “I wonder what Lio would think if he knew he’d been conceived right out there in those waves.”

The both laughed as they gazed dreamily out to the spot just past the buoys, lost in the reverie of remembering. Remembering the taste of each other’s lips as they’d clung to each other like the teenage lovers they were. 

The water had been relatively calm that day. Tidal waters pushed and pulled, but Axl had planted his feet firmly in the sandy bottom. They swayed with it, moving in covertly opposing patterns beneath the surface. They were careful to keep there torsos a few respectable inches apart, lest the girls, playing on the beach, should become curious as to just what their mother and father were doing out in the deep.

Sunshine permeated the entire coast, bringing out a great many sunbathers and Great Blue worshipers. They were hardly alone. So above the breakers, they embraced gently, smiling politely at the chest-deep man with the metal detector who had insistently beep-beeped past them.

“Our glory days?” She raised her eyebrows at him.

“What? Oh, honey, no. We don’t have any regrets.”

“I know we don’t, but it all just got so complicated. We became irrelevant.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“The war came and we were too old to be a part of it. The children all turned on us.”

“Fat lot of good it did ‘em.”

“Maybe. But it broke my heart when Little Aurelio wrote that bit about being sad that we couldn’t even imagine a better life for ourselves.”

“Our grandson was a little shit, darlin,’ and all that social media craze brought out the worst in everybody.”

“But I could imagine better. I did imagine better for him.”

“I know, honey, we all did. Just some of us knew how to be content and live in the moment. He was too young to know about that. He didn’t understand.”

“Remember the day the world stopped?”

“Yeah, I was listening to the radio in the car with the girls. We were eating egg Mc Muffins.”

“Because we’d dragged them all out at the crack of dawn to get your labs done for your physical, and still make my nursing group. Sharing that car, so I could stay home, but still needing to get all our errands done before your second shift.”

“Poor Baby Lio crying the whole way because he couldn’t learn how to grip the tit.”

“That’s why I was so determined we get to the group. I’ll never forget walking into that classroom at the hospital and seeing that big T.V. set up. They were going on and on about the Pentagon and all I could think about was flying into National Airport when I was seventeen, winding down the Potomac.

God I was so tired, it seemed like both those days were meshed together. And I said, more to myself than anybody, ‘What, a plane actually missed the river and ran into the Pentagon?’

The way that gal in the group screamed! ‘Don’t you know what’s happening!’ She was bellowing like a stupid high school girl, though I’m guessing she was at least five years older than me.

Hell no, I didn’t know what was happening, I’d been out in the real world all morning,” Aurelia sighed, shaking her head.

“I guess we didn’t really know what the real world really was until that moment,” Axl said softly.

“Maybe that’s why it shook us so much. I remember calling my grandmother that day. She told me we’d never forget it. Told me she’d felt the same at Pearl Harbor, it just bothers you less over time. It’s the first shock wave that’s the hardest in life.”

“She was wise, your grandmother. I thank her each day you and I draw breath. She taught us how to live, didn’t she?”

“She was my mother, really.”

“Yes. And mine.” Axl rubbed Aurelia’s hand.

“Really?”

“Of course. She was fearless. How old would she be today?”

“She was forty-five when I was born, so one-hundred-forty-one.”

“We miss her don’t we?”

“Thirty-nine years gone,” Aurelia sighed, “and still, every day.”

“And more than seventy gone, since the world came crashing down.”

“I told you we’re irrelevant,” she laughed.

“We aren’t!”

“Look at us walking down memory lane as if the world wasn’t changed!”

“This lake is still called, Michigan, isn’t it?”

“What’s left of it.”

“But it’s still here.”

“So are we,” she giggled.

“Exactly!”

“Dinosaurs in a post-historic time,” she said, just as the giant leapt out of the water, arcing beautifully over the pier, its underbelly leaving them in shadows as it passed.

“No, love, that was the dinosaur, we’re just wanderers through this time.” He smiled after the beast as it made its way in magnificent currents out to sea.

“You fool, that’s just a carp,” Aurelia laughed.

“Wanna catch it?” Axl winked at her in that old familiar way.

“Why not,” not she grinned, “Lio wont call for another hour.”

“Want your suit?”

“No.” She flashed him a beatific grin, stripping the robe away from her sagging but still delicate curves and diving off the end of the pier.

“That’s my girl,” Axl laughed, following.

*RaleyBlueNote: This story was first published in my Facebook Notes. It appears here in an edited version that better suits my PG blog style. For the complete story, please visit me on FB. :)