They’d been to Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina, and, months later, Alice would catch herself wanting to work it into conversation. Kill Devil Hills. Find herself brain-drafting a post for her socials. Is there any cooler name for a place than Kill Devil Hills? Photos and polls drive engagement, don’t they. Get you seen, get you love.
What it was? Five miles of Saharan-scale dunes along the Carolina seashore. The dunes from which the Wright Brothers launched the first successful flight. So hot and vast, signs warned at the tourist parking: you have no way of expecting just how daunting and dangerous this walk will be. Yet they had walked out on that trail, hadn’t they? Young married, their two toddlers in tow. Posed and snapped the boys: Hiking Kill Devil Hills. The sound of it!
Wasn’t a brag, exactly. Not the way lovies on Facebook only posted when they had wealth to show, smiles to prove how good they were doing, only the best minutes of the best hours of the best days, the one day of the year their hair looked smooth. Okay, sure, it’s a brag to share the moment Alice caught wild horses coming over the dune. omg can u even believe? Perfectly framed action shot. Actually in focus. Could count the teeth on the stallion biting the other one’s neck, glazed in edges of apricot sunset. For fuck’s sake, life should be all that kind of brag. The miracles.
But she hadn’t paid for the trip. A tag-along on her mother-in-law’s annual week at beach, which was in fact a tag-along on her mother-in-law’s sister’s annual month at the beach. Poor relation of the poor relation. Blatantly true the invite only came because Alice now possessed the mother-in-law’s grandsons who were, yet, of the cute age. Age when they could be posed in madras and seaside colors with pails to shape sandcastles. Be told when to bob about on inflatables at the same pace as Grandmommy. Investment: a grandmommy remembered while she was still young. Photos done for everyone’s Christmas cards, ready for graduation collages a decade and more on, evidence it had all gone well.
But what she wants to post—what no one in the family wants aired—is the sound of those words. Kill Devil Hills. Capture the shine on the teeth. Not the soft worry of toddler cheeks gone too red in the sun, no one venturing off to snorkel down to sharks who slept at the bottom of the reef. No one yet to notice there was a reef. No one yet to notice sharks watched them there, adorable feeties bobbing and dangling at the top of the waves. But the pictures no one takes. The brother-in-law shagging a one-night stand in the condo stairwell. The brown tiki god shotglasses from too many shots at Mama Kwan’s. The sand-in-sweat-while-fucking aggravation of all the years to come. Things that will be thrown. Nights that won’t be slept. Vows that might be broken. Teeth bared. But that is the miracle, isn’t it? The money shot? The killer, the devil, that love still gets us through?
