A shallow arch now emblazons the previously incomplete landscape. Of course, the tide comes in soon enough after and passes apathetically, dutifully, over the arch that is drawn on the sand, effacing it for eternity. Obliterating, indeed, forever the arch right then and there becoming the parti. Obliterating it from the landscape of right then and there, but not from the mind of everwhen and everwhere. A trio of gulls squawk agitatedly, nearby. In contrast, breaking waves and the rolling tide murmur, composedly, all about. At 340 degrees, the guitar solo from Styx’s ‘The Best of Times’ is just now starting. Out of the corner of his left eye, two swimsuit-clad little girls are walking toward the shore. The waves break and roll and murmur in surround sound, as more gulls squawk all over and some now also fly into view. And the sun irradiates the world, the vibrant blue-green sub-world in front ending abruptly at the razor-sharp horizon that faintly arcs over a billion impossibly bright specks of white, each at the crest of every vibrant blue-green ripple. To travel at the speed of sound, at millimeters from the surface, meandering between those ripples, and happening upon a whale that’s come up for air? But then happening upon a whale that’s, like, in the middle of the ocean, and, like, just floating there? Belly up? Sunbathing? And seagulls are on it? On its belly? And they think that they’re on some giant floating piece of cheese and start to peck at its belly, thinking it’s cheese and they’re hungry, and the whale gets mad and suddenly turns back side up again and the seagulls drown and they sink to the bottom of the ocean and the, like, Titanic is there and they end up in the captain of the Titanic’s room? And the captain’s ghost is there too and he brings them back from the dead and but now they’re ghosts too and but they think they’re in submarine hell and there are still like seagull mounts on the walls and they like freak cause they think that they look like their dead relatives, and… a radiantly hued dragonfly that had been whizzing about has just stationed right in front of him, facing him head-on, hovering an inch away from his face, at eye level. The eye-contact slo-mo spiritual rapport is nirvanic. After a couple of seconds the insect darts away. He blinks, the endless sea before him the sole witness. ‘Winning’ by Santana now begins, gingerly, somewhere nearby. The swimsuit-clad little girls have produced a beach ball – foot in diameter, orange – and they toss it to each other. The breeze does too in turn toss about their long hair playfully, the one blonde, the other chestnut, as it did his own eyebrow-length dark brown. The sand below him is dry enough once again. So the broken-off end of a huge tree trunk ravages the up-until-recently perfectly even, sandy landscape once again, as it…

“Jarvis?!” a woman calls out.

He stops. And, still squatting, looks back over his right shoulder. "Mom?" he shouts back.

“Get over here. Chicken’s here. Chowtime.”

The boy stands up and tosses the twig he’d been holding on to for the past half hour or so onto the sand at his feet. It lands just below the short shallow arc he’d started to draw on the moist sand, almost like a signature. Almost like one of those very simple, elongated, slightly undulating, thick, singular lines some people count as signatures you come across of every so often. Of course some surf comes sliding by now again and washes his signed arc and signature away for eternity with it, and washes over and refreshes his feet too and sinks his soles a quarter of an inch or so deeper in the sand.

“Jarvis!!”

“Yeah, I’m coming!” And he runs the forty yards or so back across the sparsely-populated beach to their big umbrella. Chicken’s here, all right. Kimberly, the tall, supermodel-like, teenage older sister is there, too. The man, seemingly in his mid-thirties, offers the boy a chicken thigh from the pink, black, brown and yellow polka-dot wax-laminated paper bucket of Spanish’s Frieds he just brought. Spanish’s offers a variety of fried meat, fried chicken, fried pork and churros - which are basically sugarized fried dough - for a moderate price. The word on the street, however, is that it’s their chicken that’s really worth its price in fat.

“Say hi to Bernie,” the mother says.

“Hi,” says the boy. “Um, any drumsticks in there? I’d really rather have a drumstick.”

“’Course, little guy!” kindly beams the man, gently tossing the thigh back in the bucket and instead selecting a drumstick. “Heeere you go!”

“Thanks,” says the boy. The man’s wearing a pair of tight, spandex, mustard-and-purple-vertically-striped, ultra short trunks with a sort of metal belt on them. The man is the mother’s new boyfriend (his real name is Bernard M. Jaramillo. But ‘Chicken’ to the boy). The man’s profuse orange head hair, profuse orange facial hair, profuse orange body hair, and profuse orange eyebrows and eyelashes over orange skin contrast sharply with the rich blue sky above and behind him. They say those two are complimentary colors, orange and blue. But even the colors themselves, in this case, would beg to differ.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

“So what were you doing, Jar, hon?” asks the mother.

“Nothin’,” answers the boy. “Drawing.”

“So what were you drawing?” asks the man, as he digs his teeth deep into the side of a chicken thigh, shooting out from it as he does a line of clear yellow oil that lands, unnoticed by everyone but the boy, on the mother’s lotion-smothered neck.

“A rectangle. But curved.”

“Jar, don’t talk with your mouth full,” the mother.

“Curved?” the man. “You can’t have a curved rectangle.”

“Why not?” asks the boy.

“Well,” answers the man, because by definition a rectangle is composed of four sides, each at ninety degrees to each other, two of the sides facing each other longer than the other two, of course. All straight lines.”

“Listen to Bernie on this hon, he's an engineer. He knows about all of these things,” says the mom, herself chewing as she spoke.”

“What kind of engineering?” the teenage older sister pries. “There are like a zillion trillion different types of engineerings, right?”

“Kimberly…” the mother, reprimanding.

The man laughs. “It’s true, actually, that’s okay.” He gestures towards himself. “Mechanical here. He looks back at the boy. “But why curved, though?”

‘Upside Down’ by Diana Ross now comes blaring from a seemingly now much-closer source, and the boy is reminded for a second of the sunbathing whale and imagined that it was Chicken, instead of the gulls, on its belly when it suddenly turned right side up and that it was Chicken, instead of the gulls, who had drowned and come back to life and seen his relatives up on mounts on the captain’s walls. “Well,” answers the boy, pausing his eating, holding the half-eaten chicken leg loosely at sternum level. “It’s just what comes out. I mean, I set out to draw a line, but a shallow arc is what gets drawn.”

Silence.

The boy continues. “I’ve concluded that this must be because I’m an animal. An instance of homo sapiens, in this particular case. And, as such, my hand holding the whatever-I’m-using-to-draw-with is attached to an assemblage of parts, namely bones, which are part of a system that make up my arm which is attached to my torso at my shoulder, about a synovial ball-and-socket joint. So the action of dragging a marking device along an essentially flat surface is necessarily curved, since the act of that progression occurs about a fixed center. That is, of course, unless I artificially, quote, correct, unquote, the trajectory by doing something completely unnatural: to compensate for the default proclivity for my hand-arm assemblage to draw a curve by, for example, trying to keep my x-axis going while my y-axis is locked at zero, for which I would have to - unnaturally - keep incrementally extending my elbow – meaning making the angle between my arm and forearm more and more obtuse, continually larger and larger, and approaching a nominal one hundred and eighty degrees - while my wrist remains essentially locked, and my arm rises laterally away from my body -- instead of what comes naturally, that being to just keep my elbow locked, and my arm rotating along its vertical gravitational axis, about the humerus itself, which would be far easier. Again, I’m a human. Not a machine.”

A trio of gulls squawk overhead. The radio blares nearby, inside out and round and round, upside down you turn me, love love love, blah, blah, blah. The boy feels the breeze toss about his eyebrow-length dark brown hair playfully, as it does the swimsuit-clad little girls’ own long blonde, chestnut, some seventy yards behind him, by the shore. And the sun keeps beating down. The man, woman, and teenage girl under the big umbrella all frozen in mid-chew. They are all staring back at the boy. Eventually, slowly, the man takes another big bite from the piece of chicken thigh he’s still holding in his hand, and another line of clear yellow oil shoots out from it as he does, landing this time around, unnoticed by everyone but the boy once again, on the teenage sister’s lotion-smothered left ankle. Chewing perhaps more slowly than before, the man says, “Far out, bro. You’re human. Not a machine. To draw curved comes naturally. The straight line…”

“Is an artifice,” interrupts the boy, who’s brought the chicken leg back to chin level and bitten some fried muscle off and is now chewing as he speaks, “which is unnatural for horizontal lines but not so much for vertical lines, which simply require you to drop your arm – letting gravity do the dirty work for you – if drawing on a surface perpendicular to the ground, like on a wall. And, when drawing on a surface that’s parallel to the ground, just lean back slightly.”

“Far out, bro. I had no idea you were so into geometry, anatomy, Plato-bullshit and freaking uselessness,” the teenage older sister says.

“Kimberly! Jar’s just… Jar. Right? Ain’t you now, hon?” the mother.

A myriad of gulls squawked overhead. The radio blares nearby, precocious, tease you, unease you, takes to make a pro blush, eyes eyes eyes, blah, blah, blah. The boy feels the breeze toss about his eyebrow-length dark brown hair playfully, as it does the swimsuit-clad little girls’ own long blonde, chestnut, some eighty yards behind him, in the ocean. And the sun keeps beating down. The man, woman, and teenage girl under the big umbrella are all now eating away merrily once again. Merrily now eating away once again deep-fried chicken from the pink, black, brown and yellow polka-dot wax-laminated paper bucket of Spanish’s Frieds that the mustard-and-purple-vertically-striped, ultra-short-trunk-donning man that goes by Bernard and by ‘Chicken’ to some just brought.

The conversation between the three is now: did the Yorkshire Ripper get a fair trial, or not?