by Jeffrey Husisian

     I'm in the middle of doing something, dripping a sand castle, chasing a seagull, when my sister calls me. She's standing by one of the rowboats the lifeguards have left out on the beach, and she's looking inside. She's twelve, I'm seven.

     "Gordon," she says. "Come here. Look at this."

     I run over. I'm excited. When my sister shows me something, it's always neat. A couple nights ago, on the boardwalk, she led me to a shooting gallery where the rooster crows and the cuckoo clock chimes and the piano player straightens up and plays ragtime when people hit the bull’s-eye on his back. She draws pictures, too, ones of kitty cats, Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny, and she shows me those.

     "What? What is it?"

     "Look," she says, and she points.

     On the floor of the boat is a seagull, shivering like it's cold. At first it looks normal. I think it's tired and trying to rest. Then I see the wing apart from its body, lying a few inches away, and I also see the single, almost invisible strand of flesh that still hangs between the wing and the open socket where it used to be. Still shivering, the seagull looks at us but doesn't try to get away. It can't move.

     "What's wrong with him?"

     My sister shrugs, chews on her thumbnail. "I don't know. Something."

     "What?" 

      "I don't know, OK?" She hates it when I keep asking her questions like that.

     I'm still looking at the seagull. The strand of flesh almost looks like thread, as if the wing had been sewn on and could be as good as new with one simple repair. The seagull still shivers and twitches in panic when it sees any movement. It's afraid of us. Then, before I know it, I'm thinking of other things I've seen-- things like this. A couple weeks before we left for the shore, I saw Buffy, one of our cats, toying with a mouse he'd caught in our yard but not yet killed. The mouse was trying to get away when I saw it, and the pathetic, almost plaintive squeal that came from it when Buffy bore down with his claws made me turn and run. I think of the dogs I've seen at the S.P.C.A., barking, whimpering, pacing the little space in their cages. And I'm thinking of the times I, myself, have been cruel: pulling Buffy's tail, prying open his mouth and spraying him with Chloroseptic. Throwing stones at a collie down the street and hitting it square on the muzzle with an audible thud. Stupid, cruel kid things.

     The boat shifts a little, enough to make the seagull look around, but not enough to break the strand of flesh. Two boys, a couple years older than me and dripping water, are standing nearby with their hands on the edge of the boat, peering in. They're both tall and lanky, freckly, and they probably play sports. Right away I'm afraid of them.

     "Whoa," the taller one says. "Check it out."

     "How'd it happen?" the other one asks. He's picking at the sunburn on his arm, where it's started peeling. He isn't paying much attention.

     Then the first boy reaches in and pokes the seagull's side with one of his freckled fingers, making the seagull freeze, the white of its eyes showing stark fear.

     I start crying.

     "Gordon," my sister says. She's first to call me a baby, but she sees how hard I'm crying--worse than when my father yells at me--and she doesn't say anything. She leans down to my level, like my mother would, and says, "Hey. What's wrong?"

     She has to ask me a couple more times before I choke back my tears enough to say, "He's hurt."

     "The seagull?"

     I nod.

     "I know." She places a hand on my shoulder, but she doesn't say anything else. My mother would know what to say--something to soothe me and make me feel better. She would say seagulls don't feel pain like we do, only the will to survive, or that they're not afraid of death like we are. But my sister is twelve. She doesn't understand it all herself.

     Behind me, one of the boys snorts. "Crybaby," he says. He's about to do something, start at me like he's going to throw a punch and make me flinch. Boys do that, back home, at the bus stop. But my sister straightens up, and he sees how much taller she is than him.

     She says, "Get lost, you little snot," and the boys leave. She teases me sometimes, but she sticks up for me, too.

     My sister leads me away from the boat back to the ocean, where I watch the waves, late in the day, break into a foam that washes in around my feet. We came in August this year, not July, and the water is a little warmer, not so bad when you first go in. I stand there a while like that, and I soon feel better. But I'm still thinking about the seagull.

     A little later, my brother comes along. He's the oldest, fourteen since last December, and he's in charge when Mom and Dad aren't around. He's wearing his Space Invaders T-shirt and has come to tell us it's late, time for us to pack up and leave the beach. He sees me sitting in the surf, sniffing and wiping my nose with the back of my hand, and it doesn't take him long to figure out something's wrong.

     He turns to my sister. "What'd you do?"

     "I didn't do anything," she says. "He just started crying."

     "Why?"

     "I don't know. I guess because he saw that."

     My brother looks into the boat. He's really tall and doesn't need to stand on his toes or crane his neck to see in. He looks for a while, then says, "Why'd you show him that?"

     My sister shrugs.

     "You shouldn't have shown him that, Steph."

     He stands there and watches me. He takes his time. Then he comes over and sits down next to me in the wet sand, his long legs sprawling out into the surf. I'm still staring out at the ocean where another seagull, its wings hardly moving, glides over the water, skimming the surface for something to eat. My brother doesn't say anything. Instead, he scoops up a couple handfuls of sand and pats them into a mound in front of him like he's starting a castle. He does this for a while. When he finishes doing that, he leans back and watches the ocean with me, enjoys the feel of the late afternoon sun on his shoulders and back.

     "Look, Gordon," he says, "it's not a big deal, OK? Animals die all the time."

     I nod. We don't go to church on Sundays, so there's no talk of heaven and hell.

     "It's nothing to be afraid of," he says. "They're born, and they die."

     "And we die," I say.

     He doesn't answer me right away. Then he says, "Yes."

     "What happens when we die?"

     "I don't know. Nothing. Everything stops, that's all."

     "Everything?"

     "Yeah. It's like going to sleep, except you never wake up. Think of it that way." He looks away, down the shore. "It's nothing to be afraid of," he tells me again.

     But that's not true. In fact, the more I think about it, the more terrified I become until, finally, I tell myself--order myself--not to think about it.

     "OK," I say.

     He sits next to me a while longer, wiggles his toes when the surf washes over them. Then he gets up, brushing the sand off his legs. "So listen," he says, "we have to get going. You want to go on the boardwalk tonight? We can play some video games, go on rides. What do you say?"

     Again I nod.

     I get up, too, and the three of us walk back to the umbrella, my brother, my sister, and me. We help our parents pack up, and by the time we're heading back to the condominium, I'm thinking of other things.