No time to read right now? Download Is Greater Than’s first eBook collection and take this story with you wherever you go.

We went down to Ocean Beach after waking up late on Memorial Day.  It was windy and overcast, but warm.  The beach was no more crowded than usual–couples walking their dogs, joggers, moms showing toddlers the ocean.  We stood at the edge of the tide looking at a sailboat gradually moving further and further out, its green and yellow sail bigger than the boat itself.

I did pirouettes and jettes clumsily, my purse sloshing against my hip as I leapt across the sand.  Curt picked up pebbles and tried to skip them across the film of receding salt water.  Lazy crows flapped against the wind, inkblots on the gray sky.

We stood with our backs to the ocean watching another couple fly kites.  She was tiny, with carefully tousled brown hair and a thick plaid coat.  He was thin and tall with blue tweed pants.  The waves and wind soundproofed us, as though we were watching a television show with the volume turned all the way down, a program starring the anonymous, adorably-quirky post collegiate couple.

They had two kites.  One was very small, only about a foot square, and it was nimble and whirled up and down, over and over, with just a little tug.  The other was normal-sized, with a picture of a robot on it.  It went up a hundred feet or so and swooped there, tugging at its string leash, nose into the wind.  She held the string of the bigger kite and lay down on their blanket, her arms extended like tent poles to control the kite string.

He lay next to her, letting the little kite flip and barrel-roll.  We wished we had brought a kite then, watching them play with the simple toys.  Curt picked up a crab shell and showed me where the eyes had been.

“We should ask if we can have one of their kites, since they have two,” I said.

“Yeah, we should!  They’re hardly even using the big one,”  Curt agreed.

“I was just kidding.  I’m sure they each want to have a kite,” I said, shrugging.

We walked a little ways up and found a plastic bag in the water.  I said we should pick it up and throw it away.  Curt picked it up and shook the sand off, and then handed it to me.  I held it away from my body with two fingers and started walking towards the highway.

“Are we leaving?” he said.

“No, I’m just going to the trash can.”

I kept walking, following the kites with my eyes instead of watching where I was going.  I began to be worried that their strings would get tangled up, since they were so close together.  Curt walked behind me.  I stopped when the big kite began to fly improbably far and high, too high to still be tied to earth.  The girl jumped up and ran, stumbling, after the kite string.  She pointed at it and shouted, and the boy urged her on.  She ran towards the dunes but the kite was faster than her, and she lost track of the string.  I silently rooted for her–go after it, get it, don’t let it get away.  But she gave up and flopped back down next to the boy, legs folding up in defeat.

I crossed the path between two dunes and walked across the highway to the trash can.  Curt waited for me, and as I came back he pointed up the highway along the dunes.  I met him and he said “Come on.”

“What’s going on?”

“I saw where the kite went down–let’s go find it.”

I nodded.  We walked up among the ice plants and sawgrass, looking for a string or a robot.  The silence settled around us, the roar of waves playing tricks with sonic physics.  I shoved my sunglasses up my nose and kept looking.

“Go down that path and I’ll stay up here.”

We walked a hundred yards or so, not finding anything except beer bottles and a condom.  We went back down to the highway.  Curt grabbed my arm.  “Look, there’s the string!”

He picked up the string and started pulling it towards him.  The kite was in the ice plant, its nose getting stuck every few feet on the green spears.  I ran to where it was bouncing along and lifted the string, trying to get it clear of the plants.  It came towards me and I picked it up.  Curt and I came together.

“It’s a robot in space,” I said.  He handed me the tangled up string.  I threw the kite into the wind, pulling the string hard in front of me and running a little.  It went up, dipping and wheeling.  It was natural to walk it back over the dunes like a pet seagull.  We didn’t say anything and I wasn’t sure if we would give it back at first.

“Let’s see if they notice that we have it,” Curt said.  I wanted to keep it, fly it all day and feel my shoulders get tired from the tension caused by the wind on the string.  We walked towards them and saw that they were starting to pack up their stuff.  The girl still had the small kite out and it flew low, flipping over and doing nose dives.  The big kite started to fall towards the dunes so I yanked the string and moved closer to the waves.

We got closer and closer but they couldn’t hear us approaching.

“Hey, is this your kite?” Curt said when we were ten feet away.

“You found it!” the girl squealed, prancing towards us.  She took the string from me.  “Thank you so much!”

“Oh, it’s no problem.”

We walked back to the edge of the tide and stood on the hard packed sand.

“If they lose it again and we find it, we should just keep it,” Curt said.

“Yeah.  I don’t think they’ll lose it again though.”

We looked at the ocean some more, the sailboat gone past the horizon now.  The water was a gray green, like mold in the refrigerator.

When we turned back towards the dunes, the boy was walking towards us.  He held his hands out.

“She wanted to thank you for finding her kite.  Here are two skipping stones,” he said, giving each of us a round oval rock.

“Thanks,” we said.

“I don’t know how to skip stones,” I admitted after he walked away.

Curt shaped my fingers around the rock and showed me how to throw it sideways.  He skipped his across the tidewater.  I tried to copy him but my rock just sank.  He picked up another one and skipped that too.

On the way home, we found a pile of bouquets in front of a bar, dozens of flowers wrapped in string, rotting on the center.  I nudged them with my foot, yellow roses spilling out on the concrete.

“Someone might have peed on that,” Curt said, taking my arm to pull me away.

Photo by Flickr user Ronnie44052