There was nothing to hear but the surf against the bay.
From the platform of the lighthouse Ted Corbin sat in his deck-chair and surveyed the hazy orange dusk radiating from the sand-choked clouds. The amber horizon cast a sepia glow in the calm stratosphere, and behind him the stars slowly pricked their way through the gown of night.
Customarily unperturbed, Ted found himself in a troubled state. He had spent the day attending Kelly’s funeral, and had come away from it with a mind mired in morbidity.
He had spent hours listening to people deliberate the capricious nature of mortality, how it both ‘makes you think’, and ‘doesn’t bare thinking about’. He had pondered on the expression ‘ashes to ashes’, and scared himself with the realisation that for all the billions of years prior to birth, and the trillions of years that would follow, he was now experiencing the brief, and only, glimpse of sentience that was but a spark of static in an ocean of black.
In the morning he had considered the passing of young Kelly, no older than thirty-seven, as being nothing more than a reminder that life was the same now as it would always be, the same as it always had been. It had given him a certain comfort that they were not so very different from the rest of the world, but the sudden notion that his brief part in the limelight of life was three-quarters over, and soon to be replaced by unending unconsciousness, tugged at his nerves like an unexpected call to arms.
He countered this with a thought that he had long ago accomplished the life objective of any organism: reproduction. He could leave the world in the knowledge that he would, in a genetic sense at least, continue to live through his son, Reighn, and his granddaughters.
His daughter-in-law was due to give birth again in little under a month. Ted pondered on her for a moment, reflecting on the sex of the child and whether it would live, for both her boys had died stillborn. ‘Such a shame,’ he found himself saying.
He sat overlooking the sea, sitting atop his home, a stocky lighthouse with a view of Bull Point that had been redundant for over a century. He warmed is hands on a ceramic mug steaming with whiskey-spiked coffee as gulls arced and hovered about him in the swelling breeze.
Breaker, his black and tan Alsatian, clacked across the grid-iron balcony and sniffed Ted’s thigh, his tail wagging frantically.
‘Ah! What’s the matter, boy?’ Ted said, rubbing Breaker’s snout as he continued stargazing. ‘I fed you an hour ago, don’t pretend you forgot,’
Breaker complained, then collapsed on the grid-iron, sighing.
It had been an odd day; an odd week, really. Richard Kelly had been found dead in his home. He had been a carpenter and runner to the community’s contacts in Ballycotton, on the Southern Irish coast. Ted had always found him a personable fellow, if slightly aloof at times, but knew he would be sorely missed by all quarters of the village.
‘Only thirty-seven,’ Ted mused, shaking his head with a sigh and thinking melancholic thoughts once again.