Perfectly Contrasting Stripes

He has perfectly contrasting stripes, snow white and midnight black, but the eyes with which he watches her are icy blue. She does not turn away. She approaches him and once standing at his side, turns to gaze across the ocean. She absently lifts a hand to stroke his head, resting her palm between his ears. He does not move. The sky shifts from pale grey to dusky twilight and the few stars that dust the sky are bright as suns.

“Where do we go now?” she asks. She may be asking him, or she may be asking the empty air. She gets no response from either. It begins to rain. Drops falling onto the beach in windblown patterns. But the rain is light and is hardly there before it is gone. Though the sky has darkened. The clouds are stark against the inky blackness and two seas stretch before her, one of ebony and one of sapphire, each with a silver moon, though one moon wavers slightly as though it is reflected in rippling glass.

She turns and walks up the beach, away from the sea. She does not have to look behind her to know he has risen and is following her. She stops where the sand has almost dried and the water cannot reach it. She lies down, rain picking up grains of sand, dress catching on a loose strip of log wood. Her calves are bare on the gritty dune, the crest of it only a few feet above sea level. She lets her hands fall to either side, her chest and head higher than her fingertips. He lies down besides her, resting a massive snowy head on his paws. She vaguely remembers dreams, as she lifts a hand to stroke his ears. She releases his ears and the memory and turns her head away from the sea, closing her eyes. It is red behind her eyelids; dark and red like smoke and fire. She dreams something warm, spicy and rich and the colours of a fire. Sparks flicker, embers radiate light and metal undulates in the heat rolling off each flame. When she wakes and cracks her eyelids open like the lid of a rusty wooden chest, she cannot remember her dream.

He is there, wide blue eyes watching her. The beach is grey and beige, the sky icy and the sea infinite. The only difference is the fog billowing across its surface. The sand is colder than it seemed last night. It is lighter; the clouds are thinner and weaker against the sun. She shields them with a hand, the skin on her knuckles and palm cracked and dry and white, like spider webs. “Where do we go now?” She asks again. She receives no answer.

When she does stand, her back aching as she stretches, her hair matted behind her neck, she looks at the beach. It stretches on in each direction, disappearing into mist. Behind her is the sea, ahead of her are dunes, sand rising and falling, and beyond the palest outlines of dunes she can see nothing.

“That way?” She suggests, watching a cloud of mist move over a distant grey dune. He does not answer but when she begins walking, he follows.

Text by Lucie MacAulay