Like Rain

Sunday afternoon. Hove. We're walking northwards along the beach. It's sunny and warm, but it looks like rain. It looks mightily like rain.

The sky over the water is black as squid ink. Dark static drifts fall onto the sea. Above us the clouds are a jigsaw of black, grey and white, with gaps where the blue sky shows through. The sea is glowing fit to burst its gelatinous skin, a silver line on the horizon the fragile string that holds it in.

Sunlit patches gleam in shifting rows of golden herringbones, then disappear and surface somewhere else. Where waves are breaking the sea is pink and white and brown and mucilaginous like a bucket of beaten octopus and squid. There is a rush, a sound of swallowing, and soft ticks.

On the sand, heaps of seagrass, and leaves from far off trees, broken scallop shells like stiff pink fish, midden heaps and stones.

It looks like rain. It looks mightily like rain. But it doesn't rain. We sit eating icecreams in the sun.