Point of View

Third Person

“All towns within 100 miles of the Fair Beach coast line are to evacuate immediately. Category 4 hurricane Haley will make landfall in approximately one hour. Everyone is to evacuate immediately.”

He sat in the old faded armchair where he had been since the previous evening, staring at the black and white television. The message tailored by a state mandate echoed through the hollow house for the fourth time in the past hour. The strained urgency of the message was paired with the calm monotone of the automated woman's voice speaking the words into the cold house.

He didn't move, staring through the television out into a place only visible to his tired eyes. His wrinkled, weathered skin hung from his brittle frame, pooling onto the arms of the old armchair. He sat, unmoving.

With a snap and a decrescendoing hum, the power flickered out. The television enveloped the picture from the outside in, smothering it with black and silence. Suddenly the only sound in the old house was the rhythmical tick- tocking of the clock mounted on the flaking wall paper.

He sat motionless as a stone statue for a long while, staring out through the television.

Second Person

“All towns within 100 miles of the Fair Beach coast line are to evacuate immediately. Category 4 hurricane Haley will make landfall in approximately one hour. Everyone is to evacuate immediately.”

You smash the car radio button with a shaking fist, realizing afterward that it was probably an excessive amount of force. It's just so damn frustrating! That message had been echoing in through every television and radio you had come across. You got the message: the down was about to be flattened by hurricane Haley. You didn't need some soothing, mechanical voice to remind you of that every 10 minutes.

You slid your hands free headset phone on your ear and call your mother. She left the town with your father and little sister about 20 minutes ago, leaving you to get the dog in the truck and be the last to drive away from the house you grew up in. The porch your parents had made you pose for 13 years of 'first day of school' pictures. The living room where your prided collection of grateful dead and other 80's folk rock Cd's still sat stacked in unorganized piles. The bedroom where Ronnie Simmons had stolen your first kiss on a dare. So many memories, all about to be washed out to sea in a million splintered pieces.

As you wait for your mother to answer her phone, you glance out your window as you pass by the old cobblestone bakery. The upstairs window, where the old baker himself lives, glows and flickers from what looks like a television. Thats weird, you wonder for a moment if the sweet old man forgot to turn his television off.

“Hello?”

“Hey mom, it's me.”

First Person

“All towns within 100 miles of the Fair Beach coast line are to evacuate immediately. Category 4 hurricane Haley will make landfall in approximately one hour. Everyone is to evacuate immediately.”

Every ten minutes or so, the name of my town shakes my mind from its wanderings. It shakes my mind, but nothing else. I have sat without moving in this dirty armchair for at least a day now, but it could have been longer. Time is so relative when you have no reason to keep it. The wind's shrill whistle echos through my empty town. I think my way down the stairs into my bakery, her rose colored walls near bursting with nostalgia. With religious diligence I had cut out each newspaper clipping of town events over the years. They decorated the walls, alongside signed album covers of local guys who had made it big, the beautiful work of local artists, and other such paraphernalia.

But they were all gone now. Fleeing this mecca, this utopian bliss, they had all packed up and left her for the waters to consume.

Well, perhaps they were wise, moving on to better things, to lives outside of this little beach town. Not I, though. This town, this Fair Beach, was all the family I had left. I am part of it, and it is part of me.

She is my ship, and like a good Captain, I will go down with her.