This week’s words: Blue Embankment Caress Sinew Pelagic (of or relating to the open seas or oceans. Living or growing at or near the surface of the ocean, far from land, as certain organisms.) Raw Spoon Cynosure (Something that strongly attracts attention by its brilliance, interest,etc. Something serving for guidance of direction.) Sand Reject Organic Cold

I was the first guy on the case. They found his body on the embankment, his skin a blue colour from being in the water overnight. How he was thrown up on the embankment we couldn’t figure out but it was obvious the crabs had been caressing his ears as there were marks on them like the marks you’d find after a crab had caressed you in not the gentlest way. There were bits of sinew hanging as if the crabs didn’t know about eating clean but rather just tore rudely at his ears.

The body as it turned out was one that used to belong to a guy known as New Jersey Doug. Doug was a guy who loved to go sailing on the weekends and when he could afford it scuba diving in the bay. He was the town’s expert of pelagic fish and was often in demand to speak at functions like church fetes and kindergarten information evenings, as his presentation was something to behold.

There was a rawness about Doug that just had to be seen to be believed. He told it as it was; he left no stone unturned in relaying his love of the pelagic fish, most of whom he knew first hand, species by species.

Doug was not the sort of guy who would spoon feed you information but rather posed questions and sent you away to research the possible solutions to the problems he presented. It was true to say the kindergarten kids outshone most adults when it came to research as their dexterity at their small infant sized tablets amazed everyone as their tiny fingers sought the answers they needed.

But it was always Doug, the cynosure of every occasion, who held the focus of every attendee.

But today Doug had rolled for the last time in the sands of the bay. Where in previous times he appeared a part of the pelagic nature of the bay, not an object rejected and spat upon the shore.

As the press gathered a little way off I had the real sense that Doug, an organic man in his love for the underwater world of the bay, was at last at peace and even in his final hours though dead had given back a little to the crawling and swimming creatures of the bay.

As the cold wind caressed my face that morning and mortality came to visit us again, I had this sense of the fish of the bay rising as one to the surface, in their own version of pelagic behaviour, to pay tribute to a man, a shining cynosure to us all, for whom rejection would never be spooned out but instead his raw love of the bay and the creatures within it would live on the icy cold blue waters that sucked away his life.

Written for: https://mindlovemiserysmenagerie.wordpress.com/2015/09/21/wordle-79-september-21-2015/