Oscar Adnate finds himself on a beach. Hot yellow air around him, sky, the belting of gulls. A large pale shape moves across sand that is boundless and flat and immensely radiant.

He can feel the heat on his face, the long shriveled stalks of his legs. It is, undeniably, an oppressive sensation. The pale shape moves toward him, unarticulated but for a bright red center that seems to sway.

Oscar is reclined at an uncomfortable angle, arms resting uneasily on the plastic limbs of a lounger. He can no longer feel the lounger’s tight latticework against his back, the fabric moist, sharp. How long has he been here? An hour? The sky is pale and washed, as if painted with very light strokes. Up there is the sun.

It is unbearably hot. Really; one cannot bear the heat. Oscar envisions the white sheets of his bed, his room brightly refrigerated, one of the black nurses bringing him a glass of lemon water. Is there a nurse with him now? Yes. Michaela. The one from Atlanta. She is pleasant, with big kind eyes and a deep pleasant voice that makes him feel mothered. She sits in a lounger beside him. Hers is the only voice he comprehends.  

No shade but for the umbrella slanted above him, the sand chalked with shards of hot white shell that bite the bottoms of his feet. Squinting with his good eye, Oscar thinks he sees the ocean beyond the great pale shape that moves slowly toward him, its large shuddering trunk resolving into two separate legs. He has no business on a beach, he knows. He is eighty-seven years old.

A pair of gulls descends in front of him, their cries cutting the air. The air is squelching; it has not moved since Oscar has been here. He tilts to admire his right arm and finds that someone has fitted sunglasses to his face. Michaela. The glasses sit awkwardly, the right lens pushed out by the eye patch Oscar wears, the gradation of the left lens too severe. The arm appears dark, baked. How did he not notice before?

The pale shape draws near, expanding. It is a woman, Oscar sees now, a woman in a red bathing suit. She is enormous. Overwhelming. She is the largest woman he has ever seen. Her arms and legs are great grey rounds, her bosom a trembling lake. The broad round dome of her face smiles down at him. She obscures everything, her body the entirety of his ken. Skin slick; water beaded below breasts, the fat bulges of knees.

The woman says something, smiling. Oscar cannot understand. Michaela looks up and nods, takes Oscar’s hand. Then, as if moved by force, the enormous woman leans down and toward him, bosom bagging, shoulders broadening, lips arranged in a rigid pinch. For a moment Oscar feels panic, the first fresh thing he’s felt all day, until her face is above his eye and she finds her mark, the worn spot on Oscar’s brow, which receives her softly and without complaint, the sun above, invisible.

Top image: A Glance at the Sun through Half-Closed Eyelids (1990) by Semyon Faibisovich