The frail boy sat on the sand,
partly covered in whispering water,
a muddy mix of silt and salt finding its way around his toes and up his legs.
His hair was the color of an almond left roasted too long,
and his hands toyed with the husk of a coconut,
frayed and waterlogged from bobbing on the sea's slippery surface.
As if awaiting a response,
the child peered closely at the coconut
and finally began wondering aloud how he had gotten there.
Only moments later did he recall the watery screams of those taken down deep,
or the soft sobs of those he left behind,
and truly, were it not for those hushed stabs into his mind
he would have stared happily upon the sliver of sand he had been dumped upon.
It was only then that this young boy cast aside his friendly find
and glanced behind him at the emerald slice of unknown,
a dazzling dark green scar that began suddenly a few meters behind him.
Exhausted, and heaving his bony frame upwards,
he shuffled his way down the crescent,
peering down only once when a zebra mussel sliced his large toe,
leaving a swirling, thin streak of red trailing behind.
The blood reminded him that he was alive
and a tiny gap opened on the right side of his mouth,
an excuse for a smile, surely,
though widening into the size of a cracked sunbeam
when he stopped a few feet further down
and watched the sphere above perform an alchemical change
from shapeless endless blue to oven-red contrails
twisting and fighting away from unseen objects,
to become weals on the horizon's fine-point line.
Stunned by its fierce beauty framed by a laconic world,
he contemplated the mania of such a sunset
and wondered who could bask in such a moment and still want to die.
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