“I can’t make myself throw up,” she said.  The sun was just rising, so it was still mostly dark outside.

I stared into the horizon, trying to think of a response.  Below us, the beach was almost completely empty – a few retirees in windbreakers, jogging, and the seagulls, hopping, half-flying, but all remaining strangely silent.

I was silent, too.  I didn’t know what to say.

“I tried once,” she continued with a tiny shrug, “but it turns out, I don’t have a gag reflex.”

“Everyone has a gag reflex,” I said.

“Well, I don’t.  Nothing has ever made me gag in my life.”

“Huh.”

I stood up for a moment and leaned over the railing, staring at the boardwalk twelve stories down.  A brief, chilly wind blew in from the ocean, and I looked up.  The sky was overcast, but the clouds seemed to cut off just above the ocean in the distant horizon.  The sun looked like it had settled there, stopped to watch something on the beach.  Maybe the seagulls were doing something important – maybe they were silently praying to the sun god.

“Do you think it’s going to rain?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t know,” she said.

“I hope not.  At least, not until the sun finishes rising."

I paused, then added, "No, I don’t think it’ll rain.”

I had specifically requested a room that faced the beach when I checked into the hotel, just so I could watch the sunrise.  The kids at the desk charged me a fee for changing my reservations on such short notice, but I wasn’t paying for it anyway.  She was staying in the room next to mine.  I didn’t know her name.  She hadn’t asked mine, and I hadn’t asked hers.

She laughed, “That’s all you really care about, isn’t it?  Watching the sun come up -” she gestured with a pale, closed fist, raising it above her head – “and waiting for it go down again.”

I waited for her hand to fall back to her lap before speaking.

“It makes me feel more at home,” I said.  I tried to smile, but I’m not sure I pulled it off.

“You aren’t at home,” she reminded me.

“I’m not at home.” I agreed.

I had only known her for four days.  Each morning, we both sat out on the balconies of our hotel rooms to watch the sun pull another day to its feet.  I don’t even remember how we first started talking, but for four mornings, we had little fifteen- or thirty-minute conversations.  Only a few feet separated our balconies – I could have confidently jumped the distance, even twelve stories up.

We hadn’t really met, though.  I only saw her each morning.  I hadn’t asked her for a name, or where she was from, or why she was here, in a chain luxury hotel on a polluted east-coast beach.  Regardless, it felt like I had been meeting her out here for these chats for years.

“No,” she continued distantly, “You are not at home.  You aren’t at home, and I don’t have a gag reflex.”

I glanced over to her.  Her eyes were fixed somewhere else, watching something just in front of the sun, just above the ocean, just inside of the wind, something that I couldn’t fathom.  A memory, maybe, or a premonition, or perhaps just a brief daydream.

“That’s an interesting line to draw,” I mused.

“Maybe not,” she said.  I waited for her to continue.  She didn’t.

“Well, it seems pretty odd to me,” I finally said.

“No, there’s a reason that you are not at home, and there’s a reason I know I don’t have a gag reflex.”

“Yes,” I said, “but there’s also a reason that these hotel rooms have balconies, and a reason that the sand is white -”

“And,” she said, smirking, “a reason that the sun comes up, or a reason that the seagulls are so quiet this morning.  But -” she made a face and deepened her voice mockingly, “that doesn’t mean that they’re connected.”

She laughed like music.  It sounded strange to me, something beautiful, but filled with something terrible.  It was a tsunami wave, a tornado, and it carried me away.

“No, those two are connected,” I said slowly.

I felt her look over at me as I stared ahead, inexplicably swept up in the mystery of a sound which should have had no mystery to offer.

“The seagulls saw the sky, and they’re praying to the sun god,” I finished.

She looked back out to the horizon.

“You’re a funny person, you know?” she said after a moment.

I sighed.

“Yeah, that was pretty stupid, huh?”

She shrugged and said again, “Maybe not.”

We sat for a few minutes, quietly watching the world crawl to its feet in carefully measured minutes.  The sun had risen into the clouds, and the sky had subsequently darkened.  The seagulls scattered dejectedly.

“Their prayers weren’t answered, I guess,” she said.

“Yes, well, that’s the way things go, sometimes,” I said, and then after a moment, continued, “You were telling me about your gag reflex.”

She stood up and stretched her arms.

“Well, I just don’t have one.  I’ve never gagged.  I mean, I’ve vomited before, but I’ve never been able to make myself do it.”

She leaned on the rail that faced my balcony.

“That’s a good thing, though,” I said, “I knew a girl in college who was bulimic, wound up dying of heart failure.  Some nerve in her throat corroded, and that nerve just happened to have a big link to the heart.”

She yawned, so I continued.

“Losing that nerve increased her chances of heart... um, what’s-it-called… heart arrhythmia… one day, she’s bouncing around school, and then – poof – and she’s gone.”

She shrugged.

“It isn’t good if you ingest dangerous chemicals.  You’re supposed to do it then, and there are a lot of chemicals like that.”

“Is that how you found out that you didn’t have a gag reflex?”

She shook her head and sighed.

“No.  One summer, when I was still in high school, my family came down to this hotel for a week.  On the first night that we stayed here, my mother was swimming in the pool with me – my dad was planning our week in the room.  It must have been close to 10:00 pm, because the pool was about to close.  I mean, nobody else was there – you know, there aren’t usually lifeguards at hotel pools, but they have those signs all over that tell you the rules and what time to leave, and that all young children must be accompanied by an adult.”

She paused for a moment, then turned and sat sideways in her deck chair to face me.  I sat up and did the same – the sunrise that morning was a dud anyway.

“I was getting ready to leave,” she said, then paused, and then, “Wait, you know those lights they have in pools for swimming at night?”

I grunted and nodded.

“Okay, my mom was a swimmer in high school, and she liked to finish up a day at the pool by swimming laps underwater, and since it was dark, she was using those lights to guide her to the wall.  And somehow, she lost track of them, and got turned sideways, and she slammed full on into the wall, headfirst.”

She smiled weakly - the old woman at a funeral trying to only think of the good times.

“She didn’t hit it that hard.  I mean, it didn’t knock her out or anything.  She just hit the wall, and got turned down instead of up.  She basically got lost in the pool, and she almost drowned.  I screamed and went to pull her out, and some of the cleaning staff heard me screaming, so by the time I got her out, there was a small group of employees.  One of the clerks was giving her CPR, and another one wanted to know about what happened, but I was in hysterics.  I thought she was dead… so I told them what room we were in, and to get my dad, and then I ran into the lobby bathroom and cried.  I cried until I couldn’t breathe and I felt like I was going to throw up.”

She said all of this with almost no show of emotion.  I was shocked.  All I could do was sit there with my mouth agape.

“And somehow, that led me to think that if I could throw up, I would feel better, so I leaned over the toilet, but nothing would come up.”

I knew where this was leading.

“So, I reached my fingers down my throat, and –" she leaned over the rail and actually stuck her fingers down her throat, which almost made me gag, and then removed them and shrugged, “Nothing happened.”

She waited for me to respond.

“She was okay, right?  I mean, you said ‘almost.’”

The seagulls had begun to squawk – protesting the chill to the air, petitioning their deity for justice.  I shivered.

Across from me, my companion laughed softly - not the same, genuine sound from before, something less happy, but somehow easier to listen to.

“Yes, she turned out to be fine.  Shaken, but fine.  But I couldn’t throw up.  And I didn’t stop trying until a maid came and found me there.  My family gets to stay here at a steep discount now.  I guess they wanted to avoid any potential lawsuit.”

“But isn’t that kind of a stupid concession to make?  I mean, you’re staying here, but wasn’t that traumatic?  Wouldn’t that make you want to stay away?”

She shrugged and waved her hand.

“I just don’t understand why I felt like throwing up would make anything better,” she mused, rolling her neck, “Has anything like that ever happened to you?”

I took a slow, deep breath.  It wasn't enough, but I pressed on anyway.

“As a matter of fact, yes.”

She dropped her hand back into her lap and curled it around her other one, where they both lay in a bundle like a kitten, and waited for me to explain.

“And I suppose it ties in to the reason that I’m not home right now.”

“Ah,” she said, “So everything is connected today.”

I glanced at the gloomy sky, then back down at the boardwalk.  It stretched on into the infinite, running North and South.  North and South:  the lonliest directions, the two that never see the sun.  Or does that make them lucky?  Because every day, East and West get to touch the sun, but then they lose it.  Maybe it's better to never have it.

“It would seem so.  I’m not here on business.  I mean, I had some work to do, but it wasn’t enough to justify three weeks out here.”

“So why are you here?”

I scratched my nose and tried to sound casual, although thinking back to it, casuality didn't fit the moment at all.  The sun had touched the eastern horizon, which had reveled in the light for a few short minutes before the source floated away without looking back.

“My wife left me.”

It didn’t sound so bad, saying it out loud.  I tried a little bit more:

“I caught her with another man, and she left me for him.”

Without even looking back, she had floated away, and left me to bask in this cold, blue afterglow.

“So you… what, took three weeks off and came down here to think?” she asked.

“No,” I said, “No.  I work for my brother-in-law.  He wanted me to take some time off and clear my head.  Not to get me out of his hair, or anything.  He thinks she really messed up."  I smiled (it felt like a building crumbling into the sea).

I cleared my throat.  It felt like evening already - the sky was dark, but that wasn't really the reason.  I hadn’t even taken a shower yet, but I felt so tired.  I was transparent, my wings un-feathered.  If she laughed that tsunami-whirlwind laugh again, it would tear me apart.  There would be nothing left.

“And he just sent you down here?  To let you rest?”

I turned back towards the ocean.  The gap in the clouds where the sun had nestled earlier was gone.  Everything in front of me was dark.  The air tasted heavy.

“Hello?”

I looked back at her.

“Yeah… the point… the point is, when I saw them together, I threw up.  I threw up everything in my stomach, as soon as the guy was out of the house.  I fell asleep in the bathroom, leaning against the wall.”

Her features melted into sympathy, and she opened her mouth to speak, but I pushed on.

“When I woke up, she was gone.  All of her clothes… all of the little things that she kept throughout the house… all gone.  She hasn't spoken to me since I walked into the house that afternoon.  Didn't even say goodbye.”

A silence settled.  The sky continued to grow darker, and I started to wonder if it would ever stop.  The world was ending -  I wondered how it would all end.  Another cleansing flood to drown out life?  Or maybe something more - maybe it would just grow darker and darker, eating away at the light.  Darker and darker until there was nothing left but shadows, and then even darker, until there was nothing left at all.

“Did it help?” she finally asked.

“No.  It just put me to sleep for a very long time.”

A pattern of tiny, dark specks began to spread across the sand.  The color slowly changed from off-white to brown.  The surface of the sea, already disturbed by waves, was shattered by a million tiny intruders, smashing at the water in unnamable numbers, but having no effect.

“I thought you said it wasn’t going to rain.” she said.

“I did.  I was just... wrong.”

We sat on the balconies and watched the rain fall.  We sat outside and watched until the clatter of the drops died away.

The storm rolled on for a long time.