DESCENT OF
MAN
STORIES BY
T. Coraghessan Boyle
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For T, Senior and Rosemary,
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for you,
KKDrowning
I ‘THs sroRY, someone will drown. Yet there will be no
spparent reason for this drowning —it will nt for example
be attributable to suicide, murder, divine retribution—nor
even such arcana as current and undertow. It will instead be
like so many events ofthe future: inexplicable, incomprehen-
sible. Nonetheless, it will occur.
‘There is a girl alone on the beach, a mere inkspot in the
white: nothing realy, when compared with the massive dunes
that loom behind her and the sea, dark and implacable, which
stretches before her to Europe and Africa. She is lying there
‘on her back, eyes closed, her body loose, toes pointing
straight out to the water. Her skin glistens with of, tanned
‘deep as a ripe pear. And she wears a white bikini: two strips of
loth as dazalingly white in this sun as the sand itself, She is
aftr an ofcct, a contrastaa DESCENT OF MAN
Now she sits up, the taut line of her abdomen bunching in
soft creases, and glances slyly around. No one in sight up and
ddown the beach, for miles perhaps—the only sign of life the
gull beating overhead, muttering in its prehistoric voice. Her
hhands reach behind for the strings to the bikini halter—the
elbows strain out in sharp triangles and her back arches,
throwing her chest forward. She feels a quick pulse of excite-
rent as her breasts fill free and the sea breeze tickles against
them, She's brown here too—a shade lighter than her shoul
ders and abdomen, but still tanned deeply.
‘She fll back on her elbows, face to the sun, the hair soft
down her back and into the sand. The gull is gone now, and
the only sounds are the hiss of the foam and the plangent
thunder of the breakers smoothing rock a hundred yards out
She steals another look round—a good long one, over her
shoulders and up to the peaks of the dunes. No one. "Why
not?” she thinks, “Why not?” And her thumbs ease into the