An onshore wind blows over a head-high wave as Jacob sits facing the Atlantic, his elbows wrapped around his knees. The windsock tethered to the post of the 48th Street lifeguard chair can’t hold its grip anymore. Its strings break and it sambas down the beach. A chance gale blows Dumser’s hamburger containers, Candy Kitchen ice cream cups and spoons, purple condom wrappers and sand that stings like hail from northern Ocean City almost to the southern Inlet.

Jacob looks down the beach: 42nd is still breaking nicely; 57th has blown out; and the dredging they did last spring has ruined 35th. He drags his tongue over wind-burned lips and juts his face to the dimming sky; he can taste hurricane in the air.

He scoots over to his longboard and runs his palm along the side rails, rounded beautifully as her hip, and over the rosewood-colored deck. His hand lingers for a minute over ‘The Old Soul’ written in Parkinson’s cursive in front of the fin. He puts his eye to tail-level and follows the mahogany pinstripe, slender as her Hepburn-wrist, which runs from tail to nose and straight into the ocean. Every plane and curve of the board brings back the touch of memory.

Though he hasn’t surfed it in a year and a half, his longboard is the second most valuable thing in the world to him.

One hundred yards out from the beach, the break collapses on itself. Normally, Jacob would be skipping up and down the beach with excitement at a hurricane swell. He would be sure-footed, never slipping, never falling. But now the guilty moths in his gut flap their razor-tipped wings up almost to his Adam’s apple before he swallows them back to his churning stomach. A picture from Surfer’s Journal washes through his head; a circle of nine surfers on their boards, hands held around the ring, floating up and over the same thirty-foot swell that had drowned another surfer the previous fall. He unwraps the Sticky Bumps and moves the bar with a slight pressure in circles, and practices holding his breath until his lungs catch fire. The wax builds slowly. A few times he scratches his left knuckles hard with his right thumbnail to keep himself focused and not let his mind drift back to her face.

* * *

Kirsten was already on her second pot of green tea when the arctic burst of outside pushed a dusting of an early blizzard along with Jacob through the door of Grasshopper. She wore the same red and black sweater as yesterday, and hunched over a dilapidated chapbook two chopsticks high, held open by an empty Asian-style black teapot accented with gold filigree. Her hands cupped the handle-less matching mug. Her black pea coat hung damp over the back of her chair. He trickled to the back of the quiet dining room, taking off his wet gloves, and slunk behind her, raising his hands to her bare neck.

“If you put those ice blocks instead of your lips on my neck, your ass will become well acquainted with my foot,” she said without looking up, smiling into poetry and paper, her mahogany bob cut nestling her cheeks.

He stopped short, weighed his options, and went with the lips.
“You’re smarter than I give you credit for,” standing and turning to face him with a smile that made his teeth sweat. She put her face into his, then startled back, “My God, you’re freezing,” replacing her face with her mug-warmed hands.

“Sorry I’m late. The T from Emerson, you know,” he said as he draped one of his jackets on the chair and sat down.

She smiled. “There’s more tea coming in a minute.”

He looked down at her chapbook, at the red and black slashes and circles through couplets and words scribbled in margins.

“How much more do you have? Coming out tonight, right?” He poured himself a mug of tea, cupping the warmth as his hands changed shades from arctic to savanna.

“All depends. Where is ‘out’ and how much have you finished of your projects?” Jacob blew steam from the mug. “I will take that as ‘not very much Kirsten.’”

“It’ll get done, don’t worry. Let’s go out. Let’s celebrate,” he said.
“Celebrate what, exactly? Jacob these are our senior projects. As in, the end. Fin as you and your film-fag friends would say. We don’t graduate in the spring with everyone else, remember? Celebrate after we’ve handed them in. Fuck, we’re celebrating in San Diego in, what, six days? How many more hours do you have to edit?”

Fifteen or fifty dribbled through the hand covering his mouth, pooling in his palm. They sat silent for three sips of strong, clouded tea.

“Okay fine,” he blurted, taking her elegant wrists into his palms. “We’ll stay in.”

“No,” assertively, “I will stay in and keep reading. You will go to the film lab and finish your goddamned projects. Don’t make me call your mother,” she laughed. “Then, after you’re done,” blood rushed to her ochre-speckled cheeks, as she tried to conceal a self-conscious smile by dipping her head down to her black mug, “we can stay in.” She looked up at him looking at her. “Okay?”

He sucked his lips into his mouth and gave his best interpretation of thought.

“Alright,” returning her smile. “So are we eating or what?”
She wielded a chopstick like a dagger before he could finish.

* * *

Jacob finishes the last circle at the tail and looks at the stub of wax barely bigger than half a shot glass, then throws it on top of his bag. A section not waxed well enough catches his eye; slivers of mahogany cut abstracted bobbed hair in the wax. He jumps up, knees cracking, grabs the stub and rubs it onto the board until his finger nails scratch marks in wax, then wipes dry his eyes and walks down to where ocean and beach meet to test the water. In the corner of his eye, he sees a flicker that for a blink looks like Kirsten and him playing beach soccer in San Diego. A flock of seagulls passes him, chasing food down the beach.

Standing in the soft flow of dead waves, he looks up and down the deserted beach again, watching the tiny blob that is the only soul out, sitting in the lineup around 62nd Street, waiting for a wave. Jacob imagines him with a bob cut awkwardly maneuvering a board for the first time, then looks down to his ankles at a group of circling minnows. He wishes they had teeth made of metal shards. He wishes his legs were shaped like anchors. He slashes his feet at them and walks back to his board.

The wind blows a little harder, making it more difficult to change into his wetsuit while he wraps the towel around his waist and cinches it between his bellybutton and lowest rib. He coerces boardshorts from his bony hips to the sand then begins to pull dry neoprene over seawater-sticky legs.

Two minutes of swearing and struggling and he zips the wetsuit closed, then pulls out a cigarette. A quick fashioning of the towel into a windbreak and Jacob sits, watching. The breeze catches the exhaled smoke as his toes mindlessly dig tiny trenches. He stubs out the cherry in the trench, tosses the filter into the small front pocket of his bag then picks up his board and returns to the water.
The light current ambles over his toes and pushes sand, changing and reforming the topography of the ocean floor bit by bit. He lets his board float alongside him, his palm nestled around the rail, as the part of the skull behind his ears bristles with anxiety, obligation, penitence. The sandbar sixty feet out calms the thrashing ocean to a docile shorebreak, floats his board gently up and down like pelvises on a spring night.

* * *

The black couch looked infinite enough in the shadows of Jacob’s shoebox apartment to consume both of them. Canary and scarlet washes flickered over Kirsten’s face. His hand traipsed from her smooth hip, over each of her defined ribs like sand ridges, up to her jawbone, resting where jaw and cheek met.

“Kirsten Hepburn, what am I going to do with you?”
She exhaled a little laugh. “Besides the obvious?”

She eased her way up as he reached his arms behind his head to the desk and searched for the phantom glass of water. Her skin turned a milky pale blue in the streams of mid-Spring moonlight that flowed through his tattered curtains. Her hips swayed in time to the scratchy Coltrane on vinyl seeping from the turntable in the corner. It was the first time he watched her two pallid seashells bob up and down as she walked exposed across his apartment.

“There’s Brita in the fridge. Don’t drink the tap,” he said to the ceiling.
“We live in the same city. Thanks though,” dryly.

A beach in Mexico he saw in Surfer’s Journal was what she looked like, as she peeked into the refrigerator; her Pacific shadowed back met her pale sand stomach, skin swathed in fridge-bulb sunlight. The door closed and she was aqueous. She inspected his desk, bending at the waist, while fingering pictures. She totally knows how sexy she is, Jacob thought as he bent back his head and took a devouring glance.

“Who is this?”
“I don’t know,” staring at the brown watermark islands from the apartment above. She cocked her head, then hovered six inches over his face, a picture of a tan wrinkled man with an ashen beard and a gangly awkward teenager, both with inflatable guitars and posing like Mötley Crüe.

“Oh, that’s me and Rabbit at the Sunfest Carnival six, seven years ago, something like that.”
“Rabbit?” She placed the photo next to a binder printed with VM430: Film Production Workshop Coursebook.
“Yeah. I dunno either, never got a clear answer. He’s one of the oldheads from back home, the guy who taught me how to surf.”
“Ahh. And…”
“And me, Rabbit, and his kid Brer doing our Dick Dale photo is the one next to it.”

She put her glass of water on his desk and lay next to the older, but just as gangly version of the teenager, sliding her right leg between his.
“So your friends are ‘Brer’ and ‘Rabbit’?” She bit her lip to not snicker.
“Yeah, well, his name is really Barry, so they called him Bear, which turned to Brer, because of, well, Rabbit, you know.”
“Ah, so,” wistfully into the bicep nestled under her head. “Did you have any friends within 15 years of you or just Uncle Remus and company?”
“No, jerk. I had friends my own age with normal names. They were just twerps. The old surfheads took me in and I would’ve rather hung out with them anyway.”

The room fell quiet, save for velvet saxophones and soft breaths, refrigerator humming and vinyl crackling, then a quick harsh noise from the corner when ‘Giant Steps’ scratched to the end. Kirsten sauntered to the record player, tossing over her shoulder. “‘What next?” which bounced off Jacob’s forehead and landed on the floor as her hips commandeered his attention.

“Hellooo? What next?”
Startled and a bit self-conscious, he tried to play it off. “Sketches of Spain. It’s towards the back of the crate.”
She plopped to the floor and rifled his records, eventually pulling out ‘17 Seconds’ instead and put the needle into The Cure.
“The other one is the longboard Rabbit gave me the summer before I left for Boston. He said I was a longboard, an old soul. Rabbit was a really spiritual guy in his own weird way.”
“Sounds like it,” now entwined back into him. “I’d like to meet him. Maybe he can teach me how to surf, too.”
“Yeah, maybe. Probably not. He’s getting pretty old. He was 55 or so when I met him when I was, I dunno, 11? 12? Something like that. We could go to San Diego this winter and stay with Brer if you want. The break is better in the winter. And, it’ll be warmer than surfing with Rabbit in Maryland.”

He could see a glint of moonlight flash on her smile. She rolled in closer to him.

* * *

The beginnings of hurricane swell float under Jacob, sitting passive on his board. Three pelicans skim over the water a few feet away. Down through the murky Atlantic, he peers at his barely visible feet and angles his legs up, hooking his toes on his board behind him.
This used to be one of his favorite aspects of surfing; feeling the slow rise and fall of waves, looking out and scouring the horizon for the hump indicative of a good set, trying to discern which hump will actually form into a wave worth riding.

Sitting, surveying, floating and waiting, with nothing to do but let memory ebb and flow like the underwater currents. Stingrays flap the sides of their bodies in slow motion under the black couch of his old apartment while pelicans rocket straight at the water and dive deep down, the bubbles of their wake flowing up and over like champagne on special occasions, and they surface with a beak-full of green tea. Seagulls squawk impromptu living room poetry readings. A mahi-mahi trains its fish-eye Hi-8 lens on another and chases it around the living room then wrestles it to the ground and harasses it until the other is almost crying from laughter.

The shore looks close enough to reach with seven minutes of hard paddling, but he makes his neck twist back toward the ocean, makes his teary eyes focus on the horizon. He wipes them dry and stares at the ocean’s floor, imagines what he’ll look like lying there. Should he cross his arms like a mummy? Or knit his fingers behind his head and just relax, relax and enjoy eternity? His right foot slips from its perch on his board, landing in a pocket of water that is almost an ice cube, and slumps motionless in the middle of the current, breathlessly whimpering.

* * *

Jacob’s pocket vibrated as he walked past three shoulder-high mounds of grey gravel-flecked ice on Tremont Street. The blizzard had dumped more than four feet of snow on the city in two days, and the removal crews were still slugging it out in a prizefight with Old Man Winter. Boston was beginning to resuscitate itself through short steps over the icy patchwork sidewalk. He pulled his phone out with a gloved hand and it took three rings to hit the answer button.

“I’m out!” Kirsten’s voice screamed from his phone.

Jacob hadn’t seen her when she was fully conscious since they met at Grasshopper four days ago. He would walk back to her apartment on Huntington Street after hours of staring at the editing screen to find her at her desk, facedown and drooling over chapbooks, making a Rorschach of her analytic circles, slashes and margin notes. In the few minutes between rubbing her back and collapsing next to her in bed, he tried to pack for their trip to San Diego.

“Where are you?” His foot shifted on a mini-pond of ice.
“I’m skipping down Boyleston like an idiot since I just dropped off all my work!” she gushed again, making Jacob pull the phone away from his ear.
“Awesome! I turned mine in earlier today. Isn’t it crazy that we’re finally done?” he smiled. “Hey, I’m almost at Boyleston now, keep your grapes peeled for me.”

He mentally ran through a cursory list of things to do in the next 36 hours before they flew out. The sky was still grey and bitter and though a cloud of steam appeared at every breath, the weatherman hadn’t said anything about more snow.

They were finally at the end of four and a half years of work, and dying to see the fasten seatbelt sign, the blue Pacific expanding for miles, the scarlet and canary flames of a bonfire licking the midnight sky. Two minutes of mental ticking-off and he rounded the corner onto Boyleston. His legs stutter-stepped in excitement and tiny colorful insects with velvet wings hatched in his stomach.

Jacob scanned both sides of the street for her in between downward glances for ice at his feet. As his head popped up, he spied behind a passing car her scarlet hat with a few chunks of hair poking from the side and front. She looked up and over to him, her cheeks almost cracking from their smile and waved both of her hands spastically.

He beamed back and started across the street so quickly to scoop her up in his arms and swing her around like in a Frank Capra movie, that he didn’t see the cab hurtling down Boyleston.

Her eyes were moons and her hands flapped to say what her mouth couldn’t, when out of his periphery, Jacob glimpsed the cab and grabbed himself less than a tire width from its hood and threw himself back towards the sidewalk. He faintly heard Kirsten say ‘Oh Shit!’ as his left foot landed on a patch of ice, sliding out and up until he was heels over head in front of her, the latter smacking like a wet potato against the pavement. His head rolled to the side and he blinked the blue dots from his eyes as he tried to heft himself off the side of the street so he could hold Kirsten, who was already in the middle of the street, racing across to scoop him up in her arms, and their eyes locked in a pre-Technicolor gaze, as the screeching brakes of a black car driving far too fast locked far too late.

* * *

He looks back to the shore to check his bags out of habit, though only one soul has been on the beach all day.

Jacob feels his board rise under him. He crests over a double-overhead wave and paddles out to get in position for the third wave of the set. Turning around, he sees the wave roll towards him, then realizes that the hue of the horizon made the wave look smaller than it actually is, and he’s too far inside. His deltoid and trapezium muscles tear themselves to strips while they push water as hard and quick as they can.

He feels the tail take the wave and in one motion pops to his feet, quickly crossover stepping to the center, always sure-footed and never slipping. Always so goddamned sure-footed. The cartilage inside his knees pops and cracks like bubble wrap, as he lowers himself as far as the sense of balance allows and grabs the rail to try and salvage this mastodon of ocean water. He pushes his back foot down and inside, inching over until it drags in the face of the wave. The board stabilizes and hurtles him across the middle of the face.

The crest swallows the horizon, spitting and foaming like a washing machine filled with dish soap. He looks back, and for a second the wave and the seagulls and the sand mashing on the ocean floor are drowned by the blood in his ears.

And everything is quiet, and still, and dampened enough for Jacob to hear himself say, “Oh. Shit,” very calmly.

As the crest avalanches on him and rips the board from under his feet, it catches him softly in the trough of the wave and curls him thirteen-feet up the face and throws him back over the falls, then throttles him towards the inky Atlantic floor. The rushing of the wave goes silent, as he floats without sense of gravity. The sandy floor sprints up to meet the side of his face and turns him upward, his heels lightly dragging against ridges along the bottom. He crosses his arms over his chest and watches the serene turbulence pass over him. He tries to will the sand to become Velcro, glue, tar. He tries to will it to take hold of his feet and absorb him, to turn him into sand and ash and let his particles mingle with Kirsten’s. He tries to become one with her and all the others before her, but his feet rise, the water soft like angel hands. The current swirls sand from the floor and Jacob sees the curl of her bob-cut, the contour of her jaw. He looks above and a wave flips his board on its edge, the side rail rounded beautifully as her hip, and pushes it towards shore. “Thank you,” he says, and, like from an opened bottle of absolving champagne, a burst of all the guilty bubbles flow out of his mouth and drift towards the surface. And he relaxes his body to the underwater currents, content for just a moment to float and be weightless.