Sunday Scribblings--Ocean

The prompt over at Sunday Scribblings this week is "Ocean." I've been busy with student manuscripts this morning, but on a couple ten-minute breaks, I started writing on the prompt and figure I might as well throw the beginnings of my scribblings up here on the blog; it has been a while since I posted any sort of fiction.

It was the first time any of us had seen the ocean, the first time we'd been south of Louisville. We drove for most of two days--Bobby up front with his mom, Spit and me in back--all the way from Warsaw, Indiana, to Naples, Florida. The radio was tuned to classic rock, and Bobby's mom sang along with the chorus of every song and beat the palms of her hands at ten-and-two on the steering wheel. Bobby would turn around to look at us and roll his eyes, but Spit and I were too busy looking out the windows--in Kentucky, Tennessee, even all the way through Georgia--for the ocean.

In Indiana, we had rivers, the kind you could walk across in summer, and though we'd seen plenty of the ocean on TV, it was a hard thing for us to imagine. Bobby's mom said it was like a miracle. "All that blue," she said. "And dolphins. There are dolphins everywhere."