Your Omniscience ◈ Oneshots Dedicated To My Readers

[𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐖𝐚𝐯𝐞𝐬]

There's a beach. People throw their garbage there, old appliances and broken things, empty bottles, wrappers and trash. It piles up so high you can't see the ocean.

Oliver stops there every day after school.

It's not on his way home. It's not even a detour, it's in entirely the opposite direction.

He doesn't want to go there, but he does.

He walks out of school, bag heavy with books and mind heavy with thoughts, intending to walk straight home, and his feet take him to the beach.

The first time it happens he's... ten? Eleven? Wandering aimlessly, one arm bruised black and the sleeve of his uniform torn. He doesn't want to see the face his mom will make at the sight.

The trash pile is just a trash pile to him, then.

Maybe there is something to it, under the surface, that makes him veer off the road and start climbing, but maybe he's just tired and scared and wants to go somewhere he isn't likely to meet people.

He climbs until he reaches the top, and then he climbs down until he reaches the ocean, stepping carefully on precariously balanced broken things.

It takes his mind off things, to climb the garbage pile. When he has to focus on his feet and his handholds every moment, so he won't fall or cut himself, he can't think about anything else. Not his mom's worry. Not school. Not Carlos, or his burning hands.

Oliver lets his mind fill with old appliances, the way they balance and set, and where it is and isn't safe to step, and in the background, in the cracks between his thoughts, the sound of waves grows.

He climbs one slow, painstaking step at a time, until he isn't thinking at all but for the next handhold, the next step, the even, hissing drone of the waves, and then it ends. He stands at the edge of the world, waves lapping at his toes and roaring in his ears, and he is entirely hidden by the pile of dead things at his back.

He stands there for a long time. The tide is slow, almost hesitant to touch him, but the water is up to his ankles by the time the sky flares red in sunset.

It jolts him back to reality, and he shakes the water out of his shoes and runs. Around the pile, this time, not over it, and then all the way home.

His mom is in hysterics when he finally gets there, crying so much her sleeves are almost as soaked as his shoes are. She nearly called the police, she says. Where has he been?

He isn't sure. He doesn't feel like he spent any time at all on the beach. It feels like he spent a lifetime there. He says something vague about getting lost, because he thinks he might have, and she cries so hard he starts crying too, in sympathy.

His tears taste like the ocean.

He eats a bite or two, because by all means he should be hungry, even if he doesn't feel like it, and then he goes to bed.

He doesn't dream.

It doesn't take a week before he goes back.

The waves left something in his head. That's the first thing he notices.

He wakes up, and his head is filled with white noise, crowding out his thoughts. He moves through his morning in a haze, putting his pants on backwards twice before he gets it right, almost forgetting to eat breakfast, and he's halfway to school before he remembers that his sleeve is still torn.

He folds it up and hopes no one notices.

It gets better, through the day. The white noise stays, a faint noise in the back of his head he can't quite touch, distracting, but not much else.