The Zac Brown Band song “Toes” inspired a sudden fiction piece that follows.
Here’s the link for the song if you want to listen while reading. I highly recommend a vacation of the mind. It’s almost as good as the real thing when you let your imagination take flight with the seagulls. I smell coconut and rum. Do you?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiL_beZtiQc
Key West
by Fay Moore © 2012
“So what do you want to be when you grow up?” he asks, as he places a rum punch in her hands. The savory scent of coconut and rum beguiles her. She touches the rim to her lips and sips before answering. She is a decade older than her new friend. He is ripped, tan, and used to the company of older women.
“I’m thinking maybe the pirate life isn’t so bad,” she replies, looking out over the cockpit rail, admiring the sky blue waters through which she peers to watch a conch crawling across the white sand bottom under her sailboat. The boat is riding on anchor a quarter-mile off shore.
They laugh. He sits across the cockpit from her, a teak folding table attached to the helm between them. Both recline with their backs against the dog box, feet pointed aft, and drink in silence.
Silence—what a gift, she thinks. In the real world, she spends her day talking, talking, talking or listening to others talk. The only jabber I want to hear is from the parrots, the seagulls. . .
At that moment, she hears a cock-a-doodle-do from somewhere on the shoreline.
Oh, yes, and the famous Key West chickens. I’ll listen to chatter from a cockerel all day long—as long as I have a drink in my hand, she thinks.
Her cockerel in the cockpit begins to babble about something.
Life is good today.
Fay Moore: I Want To Be a Writer 