A god of smoke

Fiction by Luke O'Neil

I don’t think it will ever pass

The five of us spread out a blanket on the grass and watched a band play Doobie Brothers covers in a park by the shore. Later I had my first swim in the ocean which was pretty late in the season for me. I walked out into the water with my friend’s daughter who is maybe six. I don’t know how to tell how old kids around that age are. She reached out for my hand and I took it gently and it broke my heart. I didn’t even know we were close like that. I kept looking back to land like is this ok? Am I doing this correctly? Worrying that a rogue wave like in the George Clooney movie they filmed around here would come out of nowhere and steal her from my grasp and suck her out into the depths and drag me into a different kind of drowning. I gambled anyway because she seemed fearless and we waded out acting silly about how cold it was but determined to go in. To have gotten it done. I thought of a picture I had seen earlier of a child’s head in a shape I had never seen a human head in before. I don’t know how old she was either. Six maybe. There was a family of ducks swimming a little further out and my new friend said we should go out to the duckies and try to save them because there might be sharks but I told her that they were too far out for us to reach. We couldn’t swim fast enough to catch up to them I said and she didn’t believe me. They can fly away if they want to I told her. I looked back to the shore one more time and saw her father waving to us and we stood there shivering in the absence of current under an open and completely empty sky.     

The Thing

We were looking for something to watch and going how about this no not that how about this no not that back and forth like a tennis match as a metaphor for example but more literally like a couple trying to find something to watch. 

Or half watch while we each sneaked looks at our phones.

I would be looking at Twitter which is masculine and she would be looking at TikTok which is feminine even though a lot of the tweets were repurposed TikToks and a lot of the videos were plagiarized tweets.