The Beach-Personal Narrative

Silvery pale hair whipped around her face, kept flowing by the offshore wind that came in through the front where the rest of the plane used to be and then funneled out through numerous small holes in the walls of the plane around her. Clean and pure with the rich salt and iodine smell of the open ocean, the wind carried none of the stink of aviation fuel or fire or ozone from electrical shorts that had filled her nose with their fumes and brought clenching terror to Asta's soul when the accident happened. Even now she could hear the screams of the other passengers, the terrible this way and that tumbling and screeching of tearing metal and breaking plastics as the plane just came apart on the surface of the ocean. That had been almost comforting

Glare from the sun reflecting off the water, off the sand made her squint and shade her eyes with her left hand, the right steadying her as she climbed across the rocks and onto the beach itself. It was impossibly hot, like being in a sauna inside a sauna, and her heavy clothing was making it worse. Panting from it and from the anxiety of where she was drove Asta towards the shade of a nearby tree, trunk curved like a sled's runner and with strange, fuzzy looking rings around it every quarter meter or so and a spiky broad leaved green canopy that looked comical. Under the palm, though Asta didn't know the name of it, the shade made things a little cooler but still unbearable. Feeling relief come in waves as she pulled off first her reindeer boots and leggings, then her heavy tunic like dress and fringed shawl, Asta divested herself of more and more clothing until she was all but nude having only her lightest long-sleeved shirt on. The hem of it fell to the top of her thighs and just covered her bottom but it was blessedly cool and she could feel the breeze drying the sweat from it and her body, bringing instant relief. Asta used the escape of needing to do something to avoid thinking about what happened to shake the sand off her other clothing and drape it on the curved trunk of the tree to let it dry, keeping only her leather pouch and the heavy woven belt it hung from that she wrapped around her waist. She also kept her boots on, the sand was terribly hot and it just felt so disturbingly wrong between her toes and across her