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Tony Press

Playa Malvarrosa

The man wearing the thong walks casually in front, and sometimes to the side, but never behind the woman who wears the bikini top, shorts and knee-pads as she crawls on hands and knees, north up the beach for one hundred and fifty yards. I look for a leash but don’t see one. Finally, he stops and as he holds out his left hand, she rises from the hot September sand.

She removes her top.

Now she walks beside him, his left arm around her shoulder, their path still parallel to the water line. They stop again and she removes the knee pads and gives them to him. Twenty steps later, she shimmies out of the shorts to reveal her own thong. The shorts, too, are handed to the man. They continue north for another minute, the waves rhythmically crashing on their right.

I fear they will go out of sight, so I stand up and just as I do they pivot and return south, each with a marvelous and tanned body. He may have been sculpted by Michelangelo, but she is beyond creation. They begin to angle inland, away from the Mediterranean and toward the Valencia skyline. I hold my breath as their path takes them directly to me.

They pause within a few feet of me for three incessant beats of my heart but continue on and disappear among the parked cars and construction company trucks. I abandon my towel, book, and life as I once knew it and run as if I were younger, but can never catch them.

Tony Press lives near San Francisco and has been published about 50 times, online and in print. If you look, you can find most of them. He generally writes fiction, believing facts are valuable but stories are invaluable, but occasionally the reverse is true. He has one Pushcart Prize nomination plus a favorite cafe for hot chocolate in Bristol, England.

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