A Glimpse of Celia Reed

Her first thought that day of any minor comprehension was that it was autumn. The leaves were littering the beach as if the trees had descended the dunes the night before and danced into the early hours of the morning, shrugged off their leaves and skinny-dipped, having to celebrate yet another successful season of green, ready to once again freeze to their roots for another long winter as autumn painted their faces red and orange. Plus, Celia noted, it was very cold.
     These were her first two thoughts: It is autumn, and it is very cold.
     She walked toward a sandy flight of wooden stairs that ascended to an expansive slab of black cement, that when viewed from above was an oval with plenty of parking for the summer beachgoers. She noticed how the dune seemed to loathe the parking lot’s presence, how it grew all around it, its sands spilling over its edges, as if at any moment the mountain of sand could be persuaded to finally let it go and shove it into the lake (was it a lake? she was vaguely remembering a lake). It was after climbing the two dozen flight of stairs and setting foot on the dark concrete that Celia had her third profound thought: I’m not wearing any shoes.
     Autumn, cold, and no shoes. This is of what Celia’s mind consisted.
     Clouds were in a constant overcrowded congress in the sky, looking as though they were arguing amongst themselves whether or not to rain. The sun was faded behind the crowd, providing for a harsh morning light on Celia’s small patch of earth. It was the perfect day to film a horror film. She worried that at any moment savages, rabid apes, or worse, aliens, would funnel out of the dark woods that capped the dunes, hissing and growling at her, hungry for her flesh and bones—she being the last living human in the area, she would have been a valuable item.
     Perhaps I’m the last human on earth, she thought. Perhaps aliens have killed everyone else.
     It is quite obvious by now that Celia Reed’s imagination wouldn’t let amnesia stand in its way for very long. She wouldn’t remember such an imagination, but before waking up on the beach she would find herself daydreaming constantly, concocting ruthlessly believable stories every hour, mastering conversations with humorous fictional dialogues she would create in conjunction with her friends. Celia was funny, witty, and would never, even upon the utmost politest request, shut up. For her mind functioned on her interior as her mouth did on her ex. And as shown, even in an adverse and oddly challenging situation, a frightening and bewildering situation, her mind could not cease to imagine something worse, albeit slightly comical and outrageous, going wrong.
     Red and brown autumn very cold with no shoes and a possibility of being the last person on earth with rabid aliens in the woods—this was Celia’s strand of thought in the only functioning, yet constipated, synapse in her brain. And it would remain so for several minutes as she crossed the parking lot and headed towards a cluster of little brick buildings, a miniature boardwalk. It was there she found a woman asleep on a wooden table, snoring, face down in a red cocktail dress with an empty golden bottle of Corona straddled by her fingers. The woman’s black hair was short like a boy’s. This was a feature that confused Celia endlessly. Yet she didn’t focus much on aesthetics or details, rather she wanted to communicate with this woman. So she poked the sleeping body. The groggy head with short black hair rose immediately, alert, awake, blinking ceaselessly, trying to focus on who had touched her. The bottle fell quickly and broke into countless pieces. The awoken yawned.
     “Celia,” she said. “What are we still doing here?”
     Celia just stared at her, wondering who Celia was.
     “Did we fall asleep?” the woman asked.
     Celia continued her blank expression.
     “We must have fallen asleep,” the woman concluded, holding her stomach with one hand, her forehead with another.
     Celia nodded for reasons unknown to her. Fluctuations in gravity would have been a better explanation than her agreeing, for she couldn’t agree nor disagree—instinct made her nod to show that she understood, even though she didn’t; couldn’t.
     “Celia, are you okay?”
     Celia frowned. She looked over her shoulder to see if there was another person there, if maybe Celia was behind her.
     “Celia?”
     And she finally spoke: “I…don’t know who Celia is…?” She said this almost apologetically, as if the woman with the short hair was the one who was lost and looking for help.
     “Are you kidding me?”
     “No.”
     “Celia, you’ve seriously got to be shitting me.”
     Celia shook her head.
     “No way.”
     Celia stared at her blankly again.
     “Your name is Celia Reed you moron!” The woman with the short black hair laughed and punched Celia in the chest. “There, you got me, now stop fucking around and let’s go home!”
     “Where is that?”
     “Where is what?”
     “Home?”
     “Oh my god Celia, you’ve got to stop this.”
     “Stop what?”     “Whatever,” the woman said as she stood up and pulled down her short dress, wiped off a patch of sand, patted her hair. “Let’s just go. I’m having bad flashbacks of the Full House series finale.”