Excerpt: Spindrift

He turned and started walking for home, but changed his mind and circled back a block to head toward the ocean. At the front of his mind was the possibility that Mickey and his brother would be more interested in a few of his timepieces than Peter Kelly had been. New owners meant new money. There was the project he was working on for Olive Sterling, and the photos of the finished pocket watches he’d already sent her. Or, if they wanted a clock, there was the oak and driftwood piece he had started for a fickle buyer and continued working on because it was beautiful. He could have it ready for display within a week.
Deeper in his thoughts, under the catalogue of designs running though his head, he was turning over the image of Delia; the lines on her face, her long limbs, the unnaturally lovely color of her hair.
Rainier paused at the top of the bluff, leaning against the wooden rail and letting his eyes wander over the sea. There were a few boats in the offing, all of a smaller variety, their shapes diminished by the sun. At this time of year the occasional pod of whales could be spotted, and there were the ubiquitous gulls and terns that drifted over the surface of the water like scattered scraps of paper.
He reflected on the oceans’ surface, from above a huge mirror catching and diffusing the light above the waterline, while underneath it grains of sand tumbled by the millions, crushed into stone, trampled by crabs and mouthed by invisible creatures that could cluster by the hundreds on the head of a pin. This fecundity, this limitless expanse of life oppressed him, suddenly, and he felt as though a wound had reopened in his breast. A single line of pain trickled along his upper ribs. To be surrounded by countless living things and feel so apart from all of them was disconcerting. Rainer wondered if this disconnect was inhuman, or if it was the most human sentiment of all.