Chapter 35 This Golden Age
This Golden Age
There is a stripe of blazing, brilliant orange above the horizon and a wide golden reflection that shoots like a ray across the water, glinting and bright.
The weather is still cool, so the beach is empty.
They’ve weighted down a blanket on all corners with their belongings, and two pillows prop up their heads so they can see the sunset.
Frankie tells Jack about the birds.
“Betty talked about seeing one outside,” Jack says. “Did she tell you?”
Frankie nods. “They’d find each other, right?”
“I think it’s the first thing they’ll do.”
In her mind, a whole future unravels for Los Angeles, and she imagines that in a hundred years there will be flocks and flocks of lime-green parrots—drifting in the sky, peering from between palm fronds, brightening the world with improbability.
In a city that’s growing bigger every day, with boulevards that get fatter and wider and buildings that get taller and taller, the birds will be tropical and exotic and illogical.
A touch of fantasy. A child will look up, entranced.
It doesn’t make sense, people will say, and they will never know.
Stories will be invented, theories tossed about. But it will be nothing more than lore.
Lore. Myth. Legend. The fascination with stars and their lives has grown right alongside the rise of movies, but where will it go?
She thinks about the article, the impact it might have.
That she hopes it has. This same city in a hundred years, this same country, this same world—what will they think about this time, this golden age?
Will they look back and see anything other than the glitz and glamour?
Will they know the truth and see the scars and blemishes?
She thinks of the ugly beauty that Jack once spoke of, and hopes that people see the truth, because despite any faults or imperfections, the truth is always more meaningful than the best of lies.
They eat their cracker sandwiches, fingers sticky with strawberry jelly. They drink their NuGrape soda, sand clinging to the bottles. Then they lie back on their simple blanket, facing a sky that’s losing brightness and seeping into violet and steel blue, then indigo and navy.
At one point, Jack rolls over and breathes his words into her ear. “Do you still not want me to say it?”
She smiles to the darkened sky. This is her Jack.
“I don’t need you to,” she says, “but I might want you to.”
Before he can speak, something catches her eye, and she sits up. Light fills the water as if a spotlight shines from deep within the earth. The waves are electric blue with glowing white that brightens with each tumult and crash.
Beside her, Jack stares, speechless. Then they’re walking, feet sinking into the sand until their ankles are covered with water that looks normal until agitated with a wave or a kick. Then, with even the slightest disturbance, it flares with glow.
Jack is saying the word bioluminescence, claiming he’s heard this happens here but has never seen it in person.
Frankie, however, is barely listening, too consumed with simply enjoying what’s before her, feeling the tug and pull of waves.
It’s as though they’re at the border of magic and reality, of fantasy and truth—a hem in the fabric of both worlds.
Maybe where the edges meet, anything is possible.
Above her, the stars are a dusting of brightness.
Before her, a tide of impossible beauty.
She wants to cry at the wonder of it all.
How easily they could’ve missed this night.
So many ways and so many paths they might’ve taken away from each other, so many moments that might’ve led somewhere else, into other arms or cities or hearts.
But like everything that is too big to understand or too vast to fully glimpse, there is something comforting in that this would’ve been here, even on an empty beach, just waiting to be seen.