I Hear Them Laughing

I Hear Them Laughing.

2024

I found myself here by accident. Some of the people I talk to call it fate. I think it was just an accident. I never thought I would end up here. Well, more importantly, I never thought I would end up back here. I spent the better part of my childhood and young adulthood doing everything I could to not have to come back here. But for some reason, some accidental fate, I am sitting on a waterlogged bench in the autumn sun looking at the ocean as their fingers slowly crawl up the beach, grasping at loose sand, trying to climb up toward me, toward the avenue.

I don’t have a job as far as normal jobs go. I don’t have a normal job because I don’t have a car to leave my little neighborhood. I work for the town. My job currently is to write twice daily summaries about my observations of the ocean for that day: the colors, the disposition, the level of debris, the temperature, the number of people that venture in.

I am not sure where my summaries are posted. I just send them to info@oceanharbor.com. I get paid a small sum for each summary, so I don’t care where they go.

There aren’t too many people around here with me. I guess that is the beauty of a beach town after the October cold sets in. All the people go back to their normal lives in their normal parts of the state. Only few stay for the cold wind that pushes off of the coast.

I see one gentleman every day. I haven’t gotten his name yet, but on my first day recording the ocean, he welcomed me to the town.

Oh, looks like we got ourselves a new one!
Yes, I just moved in a few days ago.
A few days might as well be a few years. Jessie, stop! So what do they have you doing here?
I’m getting twice daily readings of the ocean. Once during the morning and once at night.
Ah! That’s a fun one.
What about you?
I try to figure out the optimal dog walking route for both the walker’s ocular pleasure and the dog’s optimal pleasure and release.
Ah.
Well, she’s telling me to get going. I’ll see you later, friend. Welcome to town.

We haven’t spoken again, but he always waves at me.

The ocean today slaps at the shore. The water is a dark inky blue that turns green in the sunlight and the caps of the waves are thick with white foam. There is a man standing with a fishing rod on the shoreline, his feet soaking in the tide. No birds approach the waves. They stand waiting until the water recedes to race up to the wet sand, punching their beaks into the earth, and then they race back before the water starts climbing back towards them. In the sun it is warm, but when the breeze hits me, I can feel the cold air that is waiting under the clouds and in the shadows of the buildings.

The apartment that I stay at is pretty bare. I don’t have a television or anything that could be considered a vehicle for detachment. The kitchen has the standard appliances: stove, refrigerator, dishwasher. There’s a futon in the living room that I keep in the sleep position and then there is a queen size bed in the bedroom.

I am alone in the apartment, but there seems to be a presence that I cannot quite see, but that I experience in little ways. Sometimes when I am sitting and staring at the wall, I will hear the soft sounds of laughter. I will walk to the door or the walls and listen, but the sounds are coming from inside the apartment. Floating in different areas throughout the day. In the morning they are right next to me, at night they float from the bedroom.

I also see fuzzy forms that only appear when my eyes are unfocused and watery. They walk through the kitchen, low to the ground. They walk across the living room table and jump to the futon. I get up and check for little creatures, maybe a mouse, but there is nothing there but the dust that has built up from my presence in the apartment.

When I sit in the apartment to write about the ocean, I cry. I am not sure why. I do not feel any strong emotions. I don’t feel loss or loneliness. The documentation just causes my eyes to overflow and fall in front of the keys on my municipal laptop that has a barcode where my right wrist rests and a sticker of a wave.

It is unseasonably warm for late October, so I am laying on the sand and listening to the ocean. They never told me that I had to give visual observations of the ocean and I am starting to get bored staring at the waves and the old fisherman.

Laying down, I do not get hit by the cold breeze coming off of the ocean. I can hear the soft crashing of the small waves that move toward the shore. The ocean sounds calm today. I can smell salt in the air. Every few minutes, probably from someone walking by or some tussle for territory, I hear the seagulls fly into the air. I can’t hear them land, but I am sure they haven’t moved far. Every so often one of them does their cry that sounds like laughter. One day I am hoping that the ocean makes its way up the beach and touches my toes as I lay in the cold sand.

Summer was three months ago.

I hear the laugh of a woman. Her laugh is high pitched and loud, but the sound seems to be coming by force out of her throat, a tic that she has no control over. I open my eyes and as they adjust to the bright sun, I see a form start to take shape. She is a little older than myself, probably just getting into the middle of her life. Her legs are stick-like and disproportionate to the normal body sitting above her hips. She wears a white dress with a gray cardigan. Her black hair looks wet and hangs by her chin. She looks to be holding back a fit of giggles.

I just moved in. I thought it would be disrespectful if I didn’t immediately make use of the beach.
Oh well that makes. Sense.

In the middle of her sentence, she let out a loud laugh.

Do you like it here?

Her loud laugh was inflected and it punched at my chest.

I can’t complain. I think it’s nice to be here during the down season, but there aren’t many people here.
Oh, there are a few of us. The town only needs a small number of people to survive and prepare for the season.

Her laugh was rib shattering. I winced. I smiled to be polite.

And besides, you don’t want to fill this tranquil space with all those people.

I nodded and closed my eyes. I heard her laughs get further away from me. I lifted myself on my elbows and saw her standing by where the water reached. She was digging the toes on her right foot in the sand and examining the hole. She then moved to another place and did the same when the water receded. The seagulls standing around her were staring back at me.

I closed my eyes and counted the seconds between each crash of the waves.

I have been here for about a month or so. I figured this out by counting the number of observations I had written. Yesterday, the ocean was black with heavy white tips that covered the beach like batter in a pan. It was a cold and rainy day, one of the first. The warm days were now a distant memory. The cold coming off of the ocean was bone chilling. Sitting in the rain with my back toward the ocean, I was listening to the sound of the waves as they crashed. I started to feel weak in the head and realized that I might be catching a cold.

I cut my observation session short and went back to my apartment. I usually go right to the computer when I get in from my observations so that I can get them out of the way. I didn’t like having tasks I had to worry about, especially when the days are so short and the nights are so long. I didn’t think one missed day, or at least a late submission, would be a problem.

I sat on the futon and closed my eyes. My head felt heavy. I could feel the bridge of my nose pulsating as I struggled to get air through my quickly clogging nose. Inside the darkness of my mind, I began to see a woman appear. She had long brown hair that was wavy toward the ends. Her long black dress was carpeted around her legs. She was sitting in front of a grouping of cards laid out face down.

I didn’t know who she was, but I felt my stomach drop when I saw her. That primal feeling of recognition. She turned to look at me, her lips in a straight line. She casually was holding up a card with a picture on it that I couldn’t see. While still looking back at me, she placed the card down and flipped over the one next to it. She closed her eyes and I saw her chest rise and fall with heavy breaths.

I think I am becoming like the ocean: a restless, looming, cold individual that represents so much wonder but is eerie in that same exact wonder.

The wind was coming off of the ocean so strong that there were pockets of sand on the boardwalk and the road running parallel to the ocean. I stood across the street on the corner observing the ocean from a distance. Although the waves were crashing hard on the shore, the sounds were muted.

Men were working next to me doing a renovation on a house. There was a gentleman who appeared circular in his dark blue jacket. He was speaking to the men as they tried to work. They weren’t ignoring him, but they knew that the managerial banter wasn’t really meant to provoke dialogue, but to keep the atmosphere light.

You know, a lot of people understand how to build houses, but they don’t get renovations. Renovations are a particular and beautiful process. We are working in the arts of resurrection, of preservation. If you can read plans, you can build a new house. But to understand the intricacies that are stained into the fabric of a home: the history, the people, the moments, the embarrassments, the love, the hate, the fucking.

I turned around to look at the voice that was coming from behind. Some of the men had stopped moving the materials to watch the round blue supervisor. One man stood where the lawn was still dirt and smoked a cigarette. The house no longer had siding and was just raw beige wood the color of sand. There was a big red dumpster in the yard.

I turned back around and decided to walk down the avenue to another part of the beach. I usually get most of my observations from the entrance to the beach right outside of my apartment, but I thought it might be time to see if movements north or south caused any variance in my perception of the ocean and their temperment. I didn’t notice any differences. To be honest, the sound of the ocean was drowned out by the intense wind blowing in off of the coast.

There was no one ahead of me so once I crossed the street, I closed my eyes as I walked down the avenue. The buzz of the wind turned into the soft sobs of a woman. It was the same woman as before, but now she was standing in front of me as I walked. She was shorter than me and she was looking up into my eyes. She was trembling and her lips moved with no words coming out. I didn’t want to open my eyes. I still had no recollection of the woman, but I didn’t want to lose her eyes looking into mine.

The sobs turned back into the whisper of the ocean. As light began to enter my eyes, I heard the voice of the circular blue man again.

You know, anyone can renovate a house. All the hard work is already done! To build a house is to imbue character and creativity that will stand the test of time. You are creating history, you are creating a movement. In one hundred years, a good home builder will have his soul and legacy strewn across a town. And none of that is possible without you fellows.

I was almost at the corner and I heard the next words directed toward me.

Oh, you following me around?
No, sir. Just trying to get my job done.
Yeah, aren’t we all, pal. Say, where do you live?
I live in the Ocean Harbor building down the road.
Ah, I didn’t build that one. Before my time.
Are all of the new buildings yours?
I am proud to say that currently sixty-three percent of the buildings in our town are mine. I never got a chance to have kids. This is my legacy here.
I thought I heard you down there say that you only deal with renovations?
Oh, to those guys back there? That’s because they’re on my reno team. I can’t have them feeling like I care about their jobs less. Same goes for the new build team. A boss has got to keep everyone happy.
Ah, that makes sense.
So, what about you?
Huh?
What’s your thing? What’s your claim to fame here?
The ocean.
The ocean? We haven’t had a person for that in years. Good for you. The ocean is a great one. Hey, let’s get this done before it rains.

He wasn’t talking to me anymore, he had walked off toward the house that was being built. The house was large and white with big windows facing the ocean.

I turned toward the water, but I couldn’t get any reads. The wind was still howling and I began to feel little drops on my hands from the heavy sky.

I keep hearing their laughter. I hear heavy foot movement throughout the apartment. I keep seeing shadows. The woman comes to me every night, but we can’t communicate. Her eyes water, her mouth moves, but I am not allowed to hear.

For a few days, I have been feeling down. I have done my observations from my second floor balcony, watching through the square walls that create the shape of my balcony, the living impressionist painting of the white fingers crawling further up the beach.

Today, I am walking from the main avenue up east toward the beach to see how far away I can start to hear and smell the ocean. The wind is strong, being funneled from the ocean down the avenue. I have been feeling weaker over the last several days. Maybe it is because the weather is getting steadily colder, but I still need to be outside to do my work properly.

There is a cat walking in the street. She looks older but has a beautiful coat of autumn brown. She doesn’t seem affected by the cold wind. She zig zags across the street. About half of a block ahead of me, she lays down on the sidewalk. As I approach, she keeps her head turned back toward me. Her tail is still and she is indifferent to my presence.

I bent down to pet the cat and she laid still, closing her eyes slightly.

She’s the best, isn’t she?

I turned to see a young woman on a purple bike that had rust around the wheels and the handlebars. There was a basket on the back of the bike that had a sign that I couldn’t read.

I wish I knew that she was down here.
There are a lot of little guys around this area that you should look out for. Last week, I spent the whole day following a family of ducks with their newborn ducklings. They walked all the way from the lake on the north side of town to the lake on the south side of town.

I nodded.

Yeah. Sadly, one of the chicks didn’t make it, but that is life.
Are you the bike rider or something?

The woman laughed.

I just like riding my bike. It feels like I am flying when the wind picks up, especially in the winter. I am a caretaker of sorts. I just check in on all the living creatures. Make sure they are getting on fine.
That sounds like a difficult job.
It’s not that difficult for me. I love being a shoulder, being a maternal figure. People can give me their excitement, their troubles, and I will help them navigate those feelings. Then I move on to the next.
Am I next?

She laughed again.

Well, you found me. Are you next?

Before I could answer, I heard the loud laugh of the woman from the beach. With every third step she took toward us, she let out a horn of a laugh.

Well, look who. It is.

Her punctuating laughs made the cat jump to attention.

Hello, Miss. How has everything been going since last week?
Oh, it’s going. I am coming to terms that I may not get out as quickly as possible.
Sometimes we stay places longer than we want because that’s what we need at the moment. When you are ready to join your collective, when you are ready to spread those wings, you will.
I know, sweetheart. Sometimes it is nice. To just have someone. Give me that reminder.

The cat was now irritated with her laughing and walked away.

What do you all mean getting out?

The laughing woman now seemed to genuinely laugh.

You didn’t think it was forever did you? We’re all here just waiting for our thing.
Our thing?
What she means is, we all are here to prepare for our induction into what makes this town so vibrant and beautiful. We all awoke here for a reason.
Now it’s just a waiting game.
Don’t call it a waiting game, that trivializes it. We are in the midst of growth.
So, what, this is purgatory or something?

Both women laughed. The woman on the bike leaned her weight from one side to the other and propped the bike on her leg.

Only if you believe in the western God.
I don’t understand.
Which is a perfectly valid response.

As both women made their way back down the street, going in opposite directions, I walked back toward the main avenue. Once there, I turned around and closed my eyes. I walked back with my eyes closed and counted the steps until I could either smell or hear the ocean’s presence.

It’s been a few months. I no longer wake up in the usual sense. I just become awake in the darkness, ebbing back and forth, crashing forward and sliding backwards, forever washing away the loose bits and empty shells.

End.