The Plastic Something
A woman wearing nothing but a blue bra moseys past us on the beach. To reiterate, that’s a blue bra, not a blue bikini, and the woman wearing it—and only it—walks unhurriedly by me, my wife, and my elementary-aged children. She is a short frisbee toss away, which means she’s close but not close enough that she feels obligated to speak or wave. Thank God! Because we’re talking sunburnt skin, short blonde hair, and blue brassiere. That is it! Just ambling by, headed toward the boardwalk south of my family.
But then something plastic takes flight from her hand or her cleavage or wherever half-nude women stuff their plastic somethings. It’s long and thin like a king size Snickers wrapper, but it’s mostly white, like maybe it got turned inside out. I don’t know, but it catches the wind and makes a break for it, the way dogs take off when they escape the leash. It flutters through the air for a few seconds. Then, it hits the ground and skitters up the shoreline, kicking up sand in a panicked frenzy. The woman in the blue bra just stares at it, and I just stare at her, thinking, “Go after it, lady!” But instead of chasing it down, she turns smugly back toward the boardwalk, adopting the same trajectory she had before she was forced to stop and pretend like she cared. She doesn’t even look back before trudging on, like she and her untethered king size troublemaker simply “parted ways,” like separating was the best thing for both of them.
I send my prayers with the plastic something. Head bowed and eyes closed, I imagine it scampering around lotion-smeared bodies and leaping across oversized beach towels, for miles and miles, until it locates the local landfill and the other plastic somethings that left their haughty humans some time ago. It never makes it though. Sadly, after an emphatic Amen, I open my eyes just in time to watch a curious wave reach up and pluck that poor plastic something from the shoreline, dragging it out into the deep, where it eventually goes under and never comes back up. It’s not until then that I wish I would have scooped the little guy up and taken it home with me. But it wasn’t my plastic something, you know? And I didn’t want anyone thinking that it was.
Justis Ward (he/him) is a Georgia native whose writing, more often than not, speaks to the agonizing beauty of suffering. Currently, his favorite “flavor” of such literary expression is persona—dawning the masks of imagined persons with the hope of rediscovering our world through their eyes. Justis has prose published in Stonecoast Review and forthcoming in the literary magazine BULL. He recently completed his MFA in Creative Writing from Lindenwood University, and his next endeavor is publishing a collection or novel.