and when the reckoning arrives.

music: san bernadino, the mountain goats
mood: afresh

her chevrolet is parked against the very last wall of stones, she is waiting beside the atlantic. feet asleep on the mat, a bouquet of keys hangs unswinging from the accelerator. this morning when she left the house, she carefully sat her purse in the passengerside so that the leather straps would twist up and lean against the seat. she is watching through armourglass and the seagull pantomime -- plunging high to drop musselshells onto the cramped rocks below. her hands wrap around the binoculars of an ornithologist (her father's) and she spins the dials, trying to make the water clear but the distance is a vastness melting into sky. she puts down the twin spyglasses and she rubs fingers at her eyes. she can feel wrinkles, saline, the eroding indentation of her glasses. the voice reading the morning news into her legs is intimate, nearby. the sharp smell of ocean gushes in with warm air from the heating vents. so she lifts the binoculars and she looks again.