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A woman pushes her baby in a canopied tricycle, low and elongated like a motorcycle sidecar. The primary enclosure is made of the same mottled plastic as those hard vertical strips that separate the staff area in an older chain restaurant and slap the waitersβ shoulders as they brush through. The whole thing is prismatic in the light.. you wonder if the baby can see the slanted rainbows, too. The rest of the carriage is yellow nylon, or something. It looks durable. Rainjacket stuff.
Small waves lap up onto a shore over thick moss such that the water looks dark green instead of blue - not like lagoon water, not murky, because the moss is at the bottom and so the water maintains its clearness. It's just green, instead of blue. The moss has grown long enough that it does that slow-mo hair in shampoo ad thing, suspended, reacting sluggishly to the rollers coming in. You feel it croon up to you through the wash. Not a sirenβs call, not a summoning - more like gentle reassurance.
Old forts. Old huge ribbed cannons that make you wonder about the industry required to produce them. Look down the barrel, see the odd internal ridging, a pencil sharpener for giants. There's trash inside all the cannons. You can't see any crawlies.
People live here. The sight of single clotheslines of pastel dresses with cannons or guns or war forts for a backdrop. Dilapidated, eastern-European style buildings with cracked facades and lonely concrete doorsteps that people sometimes wait on. Hints of Orthodox architecture on the skyline. Smokestacks across the waterway look down on vacant industrial lots, converted and artsβed up for an electronic music festival once a year but which are otherwise a place of past. Just four skyscrapers, in a line, out of place β the harbinger of some modernisation that never really took off, or hasnβt yet.
Thick bumblebees on small yellow wildflowers. They ignore you, no matter how close you get, so you feel you could pluck them from the flower and they would only wiggle their legs a little.
A bright white adult goose with two fluffy grey teenagers by her side. A couple each eat a banana on a nearby bench, but donβt particularly look at the geese β further out to sea. They look quiet. On the other side of the rocky islet, a woman casts a very long black and orange fishing rod. It looks simple. Not old, not without a reel or anything, but no more than it needs to be.
A toy museum.
Sallow faced old grey cat, Siamese, in the corner of a window. Not looking at you, but not looking away. Getting the sun.
A cobbled alleyway with yellow painted shacks leading down to the sea. Well-kept, contiguous, so you feel itβs a boat ramp. (Slim, though. Dinghies at most.) If you crouch a little and tilt your head up, the composition forms a perfect square with the waterline centred and the gutters a very pleasing diagonal out to it. A small gem of unexpected proportion.
Red berries hanging from trees in bushels. You couldnβt decide if they were lingenberries or not. A sailboat disappears jovially behind another island in the archipelago. All in all an oddly cheery seaside home for all the war monuments left behind. You wonder what fighting must have taken place here, how badly it would have frozen over in the winter, when each navy would time their movements. Men bleeding out on these rocks or in their bunkers. There isnβt even a hint of evil or death left in the air; too much sunshine, too much time, too well maintained. You are forced to imagine.