Brown Eyes Tired and Laughing
I was aware of the girls undressing beside me.
I stared out at the sea in front of me. I was a teenager.
I knew it was normal in this place for people
to turn up at the beach and get changed in the open,
and I knew I'd better not look in case something happened.
I wasn't aware of how strange I looked, staring forward.
The girls were wriggling their shorts down their legs
and putting underwear neatly into a zip bag.
I closed my eyes. A voice said 'Where are you from?',
but couldn't have been talking to me. I opened my eyes.
She was in fact talking to me. I explained, as well as I could.
She started explaining about which were the best cafés.
The girls and I spoke for a while, as the afternoon passed.
Then after a few hours they got dressed and went away.
I felt quite pleased with myself that nothing awkward had happened.
Then I stood up, rolled up the towel, put it in my bag,
and turned around to see the three angry boys.
They looked at me. I looked at them. I nodded. They didn't nod.
They stood with their arms crossed. Two of them
were about my size, but one of them was bigger.
In short, the next day I was wearing a spectacular black eye,
which caused a big discussion in my family about how I was violent.
I kept an ice-pack on it for a day, and the day after that
I went to one of the cafés the girls had mentioned.
An old lady made a lot of fuss about my black eye,
and insisted I had a free espresso and some kind of biscuit.
I sat on the outside chairs. A cat appeared and stared at me.
It was black, short-haired, with green eyes. A real goblin of a cat.
It flicked its tail. I looked at the cat. The cat looked at me.
A week later I went home. Then some decades passed.
My eye never truly healed, my ribs never. I was always
slightly off-balance after that, with some nerve damage.
I became one of those men who walk into tables sometimes.
I found myself, old and dull, sitting on a different beach.
Some figures were bustling beside me. I turned to look at them.
It was the same girls. I studied them. They were beautiful.
I mean literally the same girls: they had not aged.
They glanced at me and laughed. It was a new kind of laugh now.
'Perhaps you're ready to tell us the truth', one of them said.
'What do you want to do to us?'
I told them, plainly. They listened and nodded.
Then we got on with it. Then the girls took me
to look at a quiet place up a hill, where there were
three mounds of earth. 'You know who is buried here',
they said. 'The boys', I said. They nodded.
Then we did it again, on top of the mounds.
From the corner of my eye I could see the cat
under a bush, suckling thirteen kittens in a row.
Then I woke up. I had actually fallen asleep on the beach.
It was not the same girls. Different ones. They were laughing,
and one of them was pointing at the erection in my shorts.
'Viejo feo', one of them was saying.
Later I went to a café - a different one - and walked
into the table, knocking over the little jar with the sugars,
and a quizzical waitress served me coffee with a raised eyebrow.
At my hotel there was a balcony where I would smoke
for want of anything better to do. I looked over
at the next balcony. There, a naked girl was riding a dildo.
There was sweat on her chest.
'Are you real?', I asked. She nodded vigorously.
We spoke for a while. I noticed a shape in the door
of her balcony. It was a man. 'Keep talking to him',
the man hissed at the girl. This went on for ten minutes.
At the end of the ten minutes, the man, who was masturbating,
came. Then he dragged the girl back indoors by her hair.
I smoked another cigarette. Then I went and knocked on the door.
The man opened the door to me, with a huge, demoniac grin
on his face, a real goblin of a man. I gave him a black eye.
He was out flat on the ground.
I asked the girl if she needed help. She said no,
she would call her sister.
Her sister turned up and escorted her away.
The man went away of his own accord. Then
I was alone on the balcony again.
The only presence was the forlorn dildo
sitting on the floor of the next balcony.
I glanced over at it. It looked at me.
'You and me both', it said. Then it sighed.
'I was once a rubber-tree, growing on a plantation
in the Philippines. Hard to say how life goes
or why. I remember a different sunlight,
and birdsong in the branches.'
Then I opened my eyes.
I was back on the original beach.
Beside me, one of the girls sat up,
naked, studying her friend,
who lay back, masturbating, with her eyes closed.
Then the one getting herself off
turned her head slowly, and looked at me,
or rather, at you, the reader,
with brown eyes tired and laughing.
‘It's been me all along’, she said.
‘I am the one who speaks the dream.’
Christopher Riesco lives and works in Manchester, UK. He is a graduate of the MMU Writing School. Poems have appeared in PN Review, Bodega, and other journals.