The boy sipped his snow cone, staring silently at the old man curled in the corner. The man was dirty, his clothes sour. He twitched and muttered, trapped in whatever darkness kept him there. Around him, Venice Beach glittered in the sun, bright as a postcard.
A cold glob of red syrup dripped onto the boy’s foot, but he didn’t move.
Behind them on the sand, a pickup volleyball game started. Merchants along the promenade were on duty; roller-blading fitness freaks zipped past as henna-tattoo vendors sipped coffee from Styrofoam cups. The brick-and-mortar T-shirt traders were open for business.
Tourists drifted in from their parking lots, smiling, chattering, taking pictures of everything: the shops, the sand, the circus of musclemen flexing on the strand. They snapped selfies with beach-bum prophets holding hand-lettered cardboard warnings and burned-out musicians with guitar cases seeded with a few conspicuous dollars.
Halfway into the paper cup, the boy tossed back his head and licked at the heart of his snow cone. The old man shrank deeper into the retreating shade of his sanctuary, a brick and concrete alcove between public restrooms.
Sunlight, sunscreen, steel drums in the distance. Venice pretending to be happy, the way it always does. Cocoa butter and salt on the breeze; laughter tangled with bass-heavy rap and the hollow clack of skateboard wheels.
The old man gripped his green bottle and coughed himself awake. Their eyes met: one bright and curious, the other ancient, confused, struggling to remember where he was.
The boy extended his cone. “Want a lick?”
A tourist raised a phone and took their picture.
The old man’s mind scrambled to speak, but before he could, the boy’s mother arrived.
“Jonathan. Come here. I’ve been looking for you.”
Suddenly alert, the old man clutched his bottle tighter, trying to focus, bewildered by the woman’s voice and the name she had called.
“Jonathan.”
The boy turned toward her, then looked back at the man, who stared at the woman, mouth open, watery eyes fixed.
Red syrup slid down the boy’s fingers. He wiped his sticky fingers on his shorts, then gave his mother his hand. She guided him around the old man.
As they passed, the old man blinked hard, chasing a memory just out of reach.
His lips moved.
“Mom?”
A few steps on, she stopped and glanced back, frowning slightly, as if something had brushed past her.
The old man slumped in shadow.
She tightened her grip and led the boy into the glare of the afternoon.
I love this story, Dave. I was there through your writing. I could see both the boy and the old man. How sad his life had become that he longed to hear his own mother call him, too. My heart cried out for him in that instant.
Profound, Dave. That word kept coming to me as I read. Profound.
So both the old man and the boy are Jonathan.
The old man is likely a future version of the boy, or the boy could be a memory, a manifestation of the old man’s past.
I like to think that sometimes we are all walking past our future selves, so I’ll go with the former. The old man is the future version of the boy. 🤔