The seagulls come, that enthusiastic and happy band, the everyday royalty of the coastal skies.
The seagull wings are as the pages from my childhood storybooks flying high in the sunny rays.
The seagull comes with a flash of silver, the sparkle of my childhood dreams. How I loved those birds that swooped and created the melody of the shore along with the lace-topped waves.
Today the light is oddly bright, casting the seagulls into dark shadows against a sky of palest blue. Their wings beat, hugging the air as they drift on unseen thermals. For a few moments they have Axel's eye, keeping him spun into some sort of daydream.
A seagull hops over the quay as if too lazy to spread its white-grey wings. Amy admires its yellow beak, though the way it droops downward to a point puts her in mind of a witch. She imagines the pointed end to be like the nose and the beady eyes to be conjuring dark spells. Amy giggles at her own imagination and wanders after the bird, flapping her arms and wiggling as she walks.
Above the white tipped blue the gulls own the skies. Their wings beat salty air as they approach the fishing fleet, hours into their haul though the day is still young. They cry and make their inverted arcs, hungry, tenacious. The fishermen wave them away, though truth be told, they love them too. What is the sea without the squawking of the gulls? The air would be empty and their ears grieving for that most wonderful of terrible music.
The gulls are tossed paper in a storm, flashes of white in the grey, tumbling as they struggle against the gale. Beneath them the sea rises as great mountains, anger in the form of water, turbulent and unforgiving.
Above us the gulls mock us with their winged flight. They swoop through the air and cry out, to them this dead air is no bother at all. To us it means being adrift on the flat ocean miles from shore. It means rationing the food and water and desperately trying to resurrect a radio that just wants to give us static. I wouldn't mind if I could catch them, they must taste as good as any bird. But we cannot, and they continue their mocking tones aloft. Eventually they tire of us, we have no fish and they head off for the coast. Unfortunately we can't harness them like James in his Giant Peach, we are perfectly stranded until the wind returns.
The cries of the seagulls welcome me home. I cannot rest in a place without their voices high in the salty breeze. They are brazen and never shut up, I can relate to that, they're my kind of bird. Their sharp squawks actually soothe me. A pebble beach, an old fishing boat and those crazy birds, its all I need to be content.
The gulls wheeled over head, nonchalant until the fish were hauled to the deck. Then they swooped in frenzied dives. They were a menace of grey feather and beak, daring, too daring. The called out with that crying squawk until their beaks were full of stolen supper. Then they beat the air in their rhythmic way until they were merely silhouettes on the horizon, beating us back to shore by an hour or more.
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