The sound of his lover rushing towards him for a passionate embrace was the most terrifying thing he had heard in his entire life. As he braced himself for the last kiss they would ever share, he recalled the first time they met.
He had just signed the lease on his apartment for what seemed to Texas eyes to be an exorbitant amount of money. He walked across the street and through the old 1950s-style shopping center. Once he passed the Post Office on his left, a path appeared along Shoreline Drive, girded by sand. It was heavily populated by a strange breed of squirrel that had eschewed life in the trees to ply its fortune in burrows among the sand dunes. They gauged his approach with cautious optimism until they saw that he possessed no foodstuffs, then returned their bright eyes to foraging.
Small bridge-like structures of wood led from the path along Shoreline Drive, across the barrier sand dune, down to the beach itself. He liked the way the wood resonated under his feet as he mounted its spine-like structure. Halfway across, as he stood on the peak of the dune, he looked down at the tawny sand of the beach and saw her for the first time. He drew in his breath involuntarily.
She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. He was drawn towards her, so captivated that he was completely unaware of the sensation of crossing the expanse that separated them. Her eyes, mercurial in their display of color, held a flash of dark emerald in them that day. She was a hypnotic jewel who became the center of his consciousness.
He spoke and his words were lost in the gusting wind. She whispered, and her words did not signify anything, but they seemed like a part of him.
Following their initial meeting, he went down to the beach to meet her every day. Some days she would stand close to him, other days she was a bit more distant. Her moods were reflected by her eyes – sometimes a deep sapphire, other times slate gray, and occasionally the green hue that had first attracted him to her.
She knew many men and women. She enjoyed taking them deep inside herself, but her love was as limitless as she was. She could share herself completely with another and yet her love for him would be completely undiminished.
She had given birth, but she wasn’t just A mother, she was THE mother. She was certainly older than he was in any case. She was experienced. She had killed before.
None of this daunted him. It was beyond love. She was an inextricable part of him. He couldn’t even remember what his life had been like before he met her. Yet they kept their separate abodes – he across from the South Shore Shopping Center and she right next to the beach.
One day an earthquake, 9.2 on the Richter scale, happened far to the Northwest in the Alaska-Aleutians Subduction Zone. A section of the ocean floor dropped and pushed an unimaginable volume of water forward. The wave traveled Southeast for four hours before slamming into the coastline with a vast explosion of white spray where it hit the rocky cliffs. Except for a portion of the tsunami which roared straight through the Golden Gate Straits and slammed its sixteen-foot crest into the island where the man and his lover lived with unparalleled ferocity.
The man welcomed his lover into his apartment for the first time. She enveloped him completely with her embrace and, once he stopped resisting, pulled him down the road to her place where they both still reside.
Literature in Small Doses 