Fishing in Beirut

The dog was on the roadside. His tongue fell from his mouth in a perfect expression of defeat, and his blood stained the tarmac in a semi-circular arc. A dead dog in the dream time. Flies were buzzing; landing, invading, and raw, and Aria stood sadly. Heat haze rose about, shimmering and delicate, and she put her hand to her mouth, child-like, deriving shallow comfort from a stance of blue compassion.
She stepped down onto the beach. This time one week ago she should have been landing in Paris, but she wasn’t ready yet. Laura had understood. Aria had made enormous strides recently, but it was still a little soon to just jump on a plane and go live somewhere new. She pushed back her hair and breathed deeply.
Gulls darted overhead. There were people visible in the middle distance, the tide way out, and the people out there also, walking, scattered, where the ocean licked the land. She could turn around and see occasional traffic, or could re-focus her attention on these dot-like figures, but neither image allowed for sound accompaniment. She heard nothing but her own breathing and footsteps, and the circling overhead birds.
Her trainers were caked in sand. It was wet, slushy, a heavy clinging sea-sludge, and the sky was overcast now, although the humidity remained. Santa Clara July. There were little marks in the sand-surface, where worms had buried and emerged, with speckled greyish seashells arranged in random curves. She rubbed her foot against the matter.
The grey-white sky was purposeful. Enormous bags of raindrops, hovering, intent, waited to spill and batter, with Aria below. She looked up and pushed hair from her eyes. Someone had dropped a can, a red one, and it lay there in the sand, half-covered and rusting. She went to pick it up but didn’t. All alone with her breath and her body, she realised how far she had come, how distant now was the panic and the fear, the incapacitating nausea of just a few months before. How sad she felt for what she had done.
Then she did pick up the can. She held it aloft, motionless, and cried.