Digging For Australia #fridayflash 650 words

Why is it, when the weather's not even particularly warm, ice cream nonetheless melts? Runneling through your fingers before you've even stepped away from the vendor's stall. More pertinently, why is it that my son even hankers after the chill fruit smack of frozen ice? Like a desperate old bar soak, he has dragooned me into also having one, to keep him company. Even though I know its frigidity will inevitably sting and set my teeth on edge. But seems I must render him some penitential reparation, for having dragged him out here to this fitful pleasure zone in the first place.

There he sits on the desolate sand. Like an unturned out sandcastle huddled in its plastic mould. His body is still spasmed for, and from the city. Our tower block on stilts, which merely serves to channel the wind beneath such vaulting limbs. A piercing, penetrative force that pinballs us backwards and keeps us from successfully escaping its concrete flippers. Until today that is. When I ferried him here, solely to be embraced by the lapping waves as they lay feeble supplication at his feet. But he is yet to unfurl himself toward their anointing. Rather than spreading his being into the limitless expanse of space, he is hunched like a panhandler who has been working the streets too long. And him only six years old.

Where he's plopped himself down, he straddles the sand's water table levels. The dry, powdery grains too wispily diffuse to hold any integrity within his actual bucket. And the darker stained grist that offers solid architectural possibilities. The long-handled spade stands unmanned (unboyed?) within the lighter strain. Redundantly wafting in its own thin rootedness. A miscalculation on my part. Far too unwieldy for his little arms. A grasp of physics or geometry whichever it is, far beyond my reach. Maybe he'll inherit a natural comprehension of the world from his father. But we've no way of ever knowing that now have we?

However, he is no more frozen, nor less motile than these rippling ice creams. There appears some synergy between him and the sand after all. His hands kees burrowing into it at the borders of his seated self. Scooping out handfuls, and casting them away. Casting a rune around himself, or building a moat? To fend off whom exactly? And still he pilots his hand down. Hoping to strike oil, or water perhaps? But he is too far from the lip of the sea for it to mine through the sand and fill his trench. He has beached himself up in dry dock.

The pace of his digging noticeably increases as I approach. He has fully encircled himself now, ready to see out a siege? If he had preserved straighter lines, then I could convince myself he was limning a magic carpet for him to take flight. All I can apprehend now, is him trying to tunnel through to Australia on the other side of the world and as far away from me as possible.

The transfer of the cream-slicked cone into small fingers gritted with sand, conspires to deliver the inevitable fall to earth. An Icarian fusion on a day devoid of sun. We both stare down dumbly at the lugubrious cone, presently performing a reasonable impersonation of a large whelk shell. Then I see his eyes crinkle towards the encompassing of all years of future disappointments held out by the world. Quickly I proffered him my cone and cradled his fingers around it within my own. One always needs a back up, a plan B, a second option. A stand-in. Unfortunately I had just the one child and said child had just the one mother.