Farms Acquired and Lust Without Regard for Yachting
“So,”
drawled Old Fartbasin as he stood on the Stormsens’ back porch and gazed out
over their aquatic acreage, “The ocean comes right up to your back door.” He made a sound to accompany his musing, sort
of a low, dying lawnmower sound, comprised of many ‘m’s strung together like a
rope bridge over a mountain ravine: ‘m’s connected by wet rabbits of
indeterminate vowels, a bridge, in essence, that no one would cross without a
baby goat under each arm and the snow-covered temple steps on the other side.
“Yep,” Ale
Stormsen replied absently, his thoughts more than halfway occupied with a
vision of someone falling to his death.
As the body slammed into the rocks below Ale wondered why two smaller
bodies, furry and four-legged, bounced away from the impact. Strange.
He shook his head and turned to his visitor. A big man, old Fartbasin was shaped like one
of those squeezable bulbs that new mothers use to clean out their babies’
noses. A straw hat with a transparent
green visor sat atop his pink-skinned, white-stubbled head. “But we’ve made the best of it.”
Old
Fartbasin nodded, noting as he drifted away into a death sudden, but
long-expected, the tufts of sea-sorghum that showed themselves above the
troughs of the gentle ocean waves. As he
collapsed on the Stormsens’ back porch he had a last passing notion that he too
was among those waves, bobbing up and down like an unsinkable vinyl toy.
The
Stormsen children, stopping short as they crowded onto the porch, thought the
old man looked funny.
.
