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"Your first kiss."
"Tragedy," Wes yawned. "My god - I remember scraping my teeth on hers."
"Your first school dance," Emma continued, her fiery red hair fanning out over the pillow.
"Tragedy. Alright, maybe there is something to it."
"To what?"
"To the belief that people define their lives through tragedy."
"Your first time."
"My god, woman, you don't give up."
"Well there's so much I don't know. We've only been married a year."
"You don't need to know that," Wes chuckled.
"Come on," Emma said playfully, "spill it."
Wes looked from the ceiling and squinted with one eye. "Triumph?"
"Uh huh; I bet."
"Well that's never tragedy." He returned his stare to the ceiling. "It's a guy thing."
Emma covered her mouth and smirked. "Your eighth birthday."
"That's not fair. You know that story." Wes thought back to the drunken clown. "Tragedy. He threw up all over me for Christ's sake."
"Now how many people can say they had a clown throw up on them?"
Wes raised his hand. "One for the census takers."
Emma laughed.
"And speaking of which, I had too much wine."
"That's what this weekend is for, isn't it?"
"Yeah," he replied, squeezing the bridge of his nose.
They lay there silent for a time.
"Promise me something," Emma said softly.
"Promise you what?" Wes rolled onto his side to face her. "Aren't we still playing?"
"Just promise."
Wes smiled. "Only if you promise to play fair."
Emma reached over and touched his cheek. "Just promise."
"Okay," he said lazily. "What's that?"
She looked across the pillow into his eyes. "Promise me that when you wake up you'll watch the seagulls with me."
Wes blinked slowly. "I promise."
And as Emma stroked his cheek, her touch lulling him to sleep, he wondered if today would be tragedy.
***
Wes stood on the edge of the dunes, in the clutter of the wind whipped beachgrass, and regarded the solemn immensity of the world. Emerging through waist high stems he watched the surf roar to life, the whole of the Atlantic separating its pelt from the muted gray of dawn.
The vague outline of a vessel floated on the horizon. A rash of seagulls fluttered a few hundred yards from the shore, their desperate cries signaling some unseen meal beneath the water's surface. Looking to the south, the chill of the morning air rolled around him, transforming his unbuttoned shirt into a white flag that issued surrender in the wind. His defeat not yet realized, Wes continued along the cold and damp beach to the figure in the distance.
"Hey you." Emma opened the comforter, exposing her silky nude body.
Wes sat down and snuggled behind her, careful to seal them in from the morning's dank air.
"We need coffee." Even in their warm nest, he could feel the chill of her skin.
The surf threatened the seagulls that loitered about, its foamy line receding a few feet from Emma and Wes.
"Our wedding day," Emma said.
"What?"
She shook her head slowly. "I see how it is."
"Oh, triumph," he replied quickly, remembering their conversation from the previous night. She leaned back and kissed his cheek. "Good answer."
Wes reached for her chest and quickly pulled away. "I'm sorry."
Emma caught his hand and returned it to the slope of her breast. They watched the pounding surf in silence, seagulls skimming the water just beyond the swells.
Their lives had been much simpler a week ago. That was before they knew words like 'fine needle aspiration', 'angiogenesis' and 'palpation'.
***
Wes would never forget how Emma called out to him that night, how the sound of panic mutated her voice, his name failing to register even with him.
The shower still running, Wes found Emma dripping wet with her arm raised in front of the bathroom mirror. Feeling along her breast, he watched the look of helplessness creep into her reflection. It didn't seem real, couldn't happen to her. She was forty-two years young. Wes stood behind her, reassuring her as he felt the familiar softness of her breast, then the lump rising between his fingertips.
Emma crumpled to the floor. Breast cancer had taken her mother a few years back.
"Emma," Wes pleaded, "it could be a fatty cyst." With a shaking hand, Emma wiped the strands of hair from her face, revealing her eyes. The truth had always shown in her emerald eyes.
While awaiting Emma's test results, they dropped everything and headed for the coast. It seemed right when nothing else did.
***
"Look at that." Wes pointed to the frenzy of seagulls in the distance. They had begun to feed, diving straight down, disappearing beneath the water's surface. "That's the damnedest thing."
"That reminds me of a story I heard when I was a little girl." Emma spoke quietly, her voice distant, as if she were remembering another time. "The seagulls would fly above the ocean, curious of the mystical world beneath its surface. Some would dive in, leaving those that remained above in mourning, waiting for their return. But of those that dove in, some would dive too deep and lose their life, leaving this world for the next, never to return."
"But they come back. See." Wes waited for the seagulls to rise from the water.
Emma leaned back and whispered in his ear. "Sometimes they don't."
They stared in silence.
"Today," she said, reaching back to rub his cheek.
Wes laid his head on her shoulder, lost in the wisps of her flailing hair. He looked out onto the water, the moment caught between triumph and tragedy, and waited for the seagulls to return.
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