Incongruous

by SID SIBO

Driving the wrong side of the road was hard enough. Kevin’s bloodless fingers were skeletal stripes against the steering wheel’s dull slate cover. He eased one hand loose, holding up a photo to the shoreline vista for comparison. Through open windows, ocean waves sounded like a bird ruffling wings against feathered sides, but his thirteen-year-old granddaughter heard nothing beyond her own sleeping breaths. Since her California home burned over, complete with cockatiel, she needed pills to help her sleep. He laid the photo on the seat and rubbed his palm against the bristles on his unshaven chin.

No match. No surprise. His daughter’s rhapsodic Instagram post named the mystery landscape in the photo as worthy of her final resting place. Since she didn’t plan on dying for decades, it was all they had to go on. But she wouldn’t have chosen a spot along the road.

He glanced at June, and a lift of freckled chin trapped his gaze. Her tangled curls held a fading electric green over natural Celtic red. Gravel crunched under his drifting tires, and he jerked the rental car back onto pavement. Ireland’s west coast roads edged serrated cliffs. He pulled over, idled the engine. He waited for his hands to quit shaking, wondering if their family was destined to die off, two by two. Daughter and mother. Grandfather with granddaughter.

Three curves downhill, a brown post with yellow graphics, their next trailhead. Dingle Way. Pushing his spine into the seat’s back, Kevin prayed for a match—a distinct pattern of rocks, and this breaking ocean half-a-globe from the one where they’d left his wife’s ashes. Cindered bits of that cream-cool skin Kevin once warmed with his own. But the Pacific and Atlantic touched somewhere. Tierra del Fuego? Chile? The cessation of movement woke June, and her eyelids flickered open. “Time to walk, honey.” Salt air flowed among gorse and grasses. She shrugged on a daypack, and he handed her the photo.

June led the way, lanky legs gaining momentum. He worried she might disappear around the trail’s sharp bends. His wife and daughter miscalculated the wildfire evacuation, intending to retrieve June’s birthday present while he distracted her with a game of basketball, one-on-one, at their place nearer the coast. A hot cramp rose in his gut. Then beach roses stopped him cold: his wife wore this scent in her silvering hair, like starlit droplets shining among salmon-red petals. But California mornings too dry for dew anymore. Completely cried out, he knew the feeling.

“Hold up a sec.”

She paused, sat on an exposed ledge, shucked gorse blossoms. Petals layered over her boots. Kevin tugged the water bottle from a side pocket. Cold sluiced through the blue heart of him. Why had he brought a child into this fathomless world? And despite deepening risks, escalating doubts, that child insisted on doing the same. His mind emptied, blank and barricaded, while the ocean rustled on repeat, far below.

A startle of motion ambushed him. At his feet, a baseball-sized wagtail banked and landed. Kevin shook his head, and pointed to his granddaughter. “She’s got the trail mix.”

The bird surprised him, lifting into the wind, then dropping onto June’s knee. The Cliffs of Moher climate display had surprised them too, though he had stared, mesmerized, while June flinched away. Now he saw why: the projected future would not redeem her painful present. By the time she could be a grandmother, melting Scandinavian glaciers would chill—or slow, or stop—the warm ocean currents flowing past the Emerald Isle. Ireland’s nourishing greenness would fade to indelible, inedible snow.

Nuts and seeds slid from June’s palm. The wagtail picked a sesame off her bare thigh, then shifted to a sandstone outcrop. Her eyes shone wet as they followed the short flight.

Kevin looked away, at the high gibbous moon, faint in front of cerulean, sweat smudging his vision. From crater-shadows glowed the distant rabbit’s cool, critical eye. Human passions and prides, lies and legacies, all absurd. June stood, without speaking. For weeks now, she hadn’t said a word. Lit and limned by the descending sun, his granddaughter glimmered, sculpted ice.