September 1st, 2015 - Thad Smull

My son and I sat and leaned back against a piece of sun-bleached driftwood that had been driven deep into the sand by the surf. For the eight years of my son’s life, we had come to this spot on the Oregon Coast for three nights every summer. We spent our days combing the beach, investigating tide pools, and searching for shells and washed-up treasures. At night, we sat by a fire. I drank real beer, my son drank root beer. We watched for shooting stars and satellites and named new constellations.

The crowds had faded with the sunlight. Just after sundown, we counted a dozen or so other fires scattered up and down the beach. As the night and cold crept up, the fires and muffled voices and laughter of invisible people faded. Until it was only us, the salt air, and the sound of the rising tide.

The warm air and cold currents had moved the fog in and shrouded the small amount of light that reflected off the lip of the breakers and sea foam being pushed up the foreshore. Something white as a pearl inside the mist moved towards us and, like Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, a woman appeared as if born out of the water, and stepped into the halo of our fire.

The Venus wore white jeans and a black tank top. A delicate chain around her wrist glimmered as she hugged her bare arms to fend off the night chill. She raised an unlit cigarette and in an accent I couldn’t quite place asked, “May I have a piece of your fire?”

With a makeshift stick stoker, my son sent sparks into the air as he prodded and stirred our seaboard hearth in search for a bit of kindling. 

The Venus looked into his eyes and warned, “Be careful, do not burn yourself.”

I sent him to gather beach grass from the dunes behind us and invited The Venus to have a seat and warm herself. She knelt before the fire and leaned back on the heels of her bare feet. Her charcoal eyes flickered in the firelight and her black lashes fluttered like ravens’ wings as she surveyed the empty bottles next to our firepit. “Are you father and son?” she asked.

I affirmed we were.

My son returned with a handful of grass and held it to the fire where it smoldered and smoked. I suggested he twist a few blades into a wick and a small flame blinked to life.

The Venus gathered her dark windblown hair from her face and leaned in close to my son to cup the flame. She flashed me an unruly look, and declared, “I am corrupting your son.”

She took a long drag, lifted her face to the heavens and exhaled a plume that rose like the smoke from a burnt sacrifice and confided, “It’s been a night. I have had a quarrel.”

The thought that a jealous man in search of The Venus might be next to emerge from the blackness passed through my mind, but it didn’t stop me from offering her a beer. The Venus reached for it but hesitated. Instead, she stood and, as she stepped back into the night, said, “Thank you for a piece of your fire.”

We sat stunned as The Venus was swallowed back into the darkness that had manifested her. I broke the silence to ask, “Was that a mermaid?”

We shared a nervous laugh, and I told him about the Greek myth of sirens whose beautiful songs enticed sailors to abandon ship and drown and how Odysseus tied himself to his ship’s mast and made his crew cover their ears to avoid their temptation. But in this case, we’d have to cover our eyes.

Despite the wisdom Circe shared with Odysseus and that Homer passed down to us, we let another hour slip by as we stared into the turbulent shadows where The Venus had plunged. Eventually we gave up, kicked sand over the fire, and walked back to our roadside motel.

The next morning, we walked to a diner for breakfast then spent the day driving down Highway 101 and stopped off for short hikes and to watch surfers. But all day I kept an uneasy watch, like a sentry posted in the crow’s nest of a galleon tormented by the call of The Venus.

That evening we picked up a pizza and made our way down to the beach where we staked out our usual spot and built a fire.

The night wore on, the other fires flickered away, and the fog rolled in, but The Venus didn’t. We were about to pack it in when we heard a faint jingling. Two straggly dogs with chain collars ran out of the mist followed by an old man who limped into the glow of our fire.

The old man was breathing heavily but managed to wheeze out, “You mind if I borrow your fire?”

We told him he was welcome to it, and he hacked and coughed and grumbled something about the ills of having smoked all his life. He groaned his crooked body down onto the warm sand next to the fire. His face was scarred and disfigured from a hard life; his clothes were oversized and long faded into one shade of dirt brown.

The old man’s cloudy inset eyes surveyed my last unopened beer and the pizza box. “You father and son?” he asked.

I told him we were and offered him the beer and leftovers, which he shared with his dogs. He asked where we’d come from and what kind of industry we had there, then rattled on about being a handy man and never settling down. He pointed up at the road along the beach and said he lived in the pickup with the camper shell. I turned expecting to see a heap of shit on wheels. It could have been hidden by the dune grass, but I didn’t see anything.

Once he’d finished the pizza and beer, he struggled to his feet, thanked us for the sustenance and use of our fire, and said he’d like to stay but he was looking for something he’d lost. He limped back into the darkness with his rattling mutts by his side.

We sat dumbfounded until my son asked, “What do you think he’s looking for?”

I told him I had no idea but that I didn’t think he’d find it in the dark. We didn’t stick around to find out.

The next day we bought some handmade saltwater taffy and sat on a boardwalk bench to eat it. My son was quiet. He had a look in his eyes that told me he was turning something over in his head. “What do you think happened to that man’s face?’ he finally asked.

I told him I couldn’t – and didn’t want to – imagine, but that I had been thinking about the last two night’s visitors and the way the woman had reminded me of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus painting. I told him the painting was inspired by the myth of Venus the Roman goddess of love and beauty born from sea spray and foam and that the old man reminded me of Venus’s husband Vulcan the god of the forge and fire who had been cast down to Earth. I also told him about Mars the god of war who was in love with Venus and that one night Vulcan caught Mars with Venus, so he trapped him in a metal net.

My son wondered if Mars might appear at our fire that night. I said I guess we’d find out. He asked what the god of war might look like and what he might want from us. We mulled these questions over and considered our options.

Back on the beach that evening we dug another shallow pit and stacked our tinder in the center. At dusk I pointed out Mars. It sat just above the waterline faint and low and angry red. Whatever it was the God of War wanted of our fire that night we weren’t sure we wanted to know, so we left it unlit and walked back to our motel.

We’ll take our annual beach trip this summer, but then my son leaves for college in the fall, and I don’t know if we’ll have another beach trip again. But on our last night – and possibly for the last time – we’ll do what we’ve done for the last ten years: leave an offering of firewood on the beach to appease an unknown god.

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Thad Smull resides and writes in Des Moines, Iowa and works for Drake University.