A revision/restructuring of a piece I'd written before, which I now think is ready for submission. Flashquake... Brevity's reading period is closed. Anyone know of any other publications who might be interested in a piece only 1,001 words long?

There's No Town Called Big Sur

I felt that we had reached the end of the world, at this moment, on this evening, and together. We had been traveling for almost four years and we'd finally gotten to Route 1, the Pacific Coast Highway, along the edge of California. It was September and we were driving on a cliff at the edge of the world and we didn't know where we'd sleep that night. The road wound like a snapped rubber band, perched on a steep red rock outcropping, a hill of rubble leading to the heat-glimmering sand and to the painfully bright ocean, yards below.

I was riding cross-legged in the passenger seat, barefoot. Kevin drove, because he had seen this highway a few weeks ago, taken a weekend road trip with his visiting brother when I had to work, and so I never had seen this road, which is a thing to see, something you come to visit. The Pacific Coast Highway is not the kind of road where you can enjoy the view while you drive: the sharp curves lined on both sides by life-threatening, rocky plummets, and the inevitable California rental car--the red or yellow Ford Mustang convertible--doing 70 in the oncoming lane. We were listening to "Missed the Boat" by Modest Mouse and I was thinking we had discovered the perfect setting for that track: four o’clock California coastal highway, sun sliding toward the ocean, road trip, no plans.

Late in the afternoon, he pulled the car over near a blue highway sign for an elephant seal rookery, because this was the kind of drive where we would follow tourist arrows and random urges for a croissant. And, I had never seen an elephant seal before. At first, my small hands gripping the top of the chain link fence, on a cliff high above their birthing beach, I could barely pick them out against the sand: their already sun-brown bodies matted with the dirt they slap on their back to keep cool. A small movement appeared on the sand, a rippling quiver of muscle and then I could see them all, like road bumps on the beach for miles. I watched my first seal dance himself across the sand, a frustrated, messy movement that resembled a series of belly-flops. The whole clan snored in the lowering golden sun and heaved their massive bodies around and sometimes climbed right over a sleeping comrade, but somehow maintained an air of grace. In the only photograph of me there, I am pointing to the beach below, laughing.

About an hour later, he found a little pullout shoulder of sand, surrounded by tall, waving silhouettes of sea grass, backed in and popped the hatchback. I slipped on my sandals and pulled myself out of the car, surprised by the new chill in the air up here, above the ocean. We climbed into the trunk, and spread a sleeping bag across our bare knees, to keep us warm while we watched the sun set right into the water.

Watching the sun sink into the ocean can only happen on a cliff like this, high above the end of everything, in a place like this, along together and at peace with our traveling. A bright red Japanese-flag sun dips lower, towards the elusive horizon, wrapping itself in the tall grasses, blackening them with its shadow. The haze of California makes the whole sky look like the aftermath of an explosion, which I guess is what the sun really is, after all.

He brought his camera into the trunk, the orange and brown strap betraying the Minolta’s age and generation, decades before now. Do I remember the combustion-red sun so clearly because a photograph exists, a tangible reminder that illuminates the other sensory details of that night more clearly? I remember we tried to lift our bare feet, protruding from the end of the unzipped sleeping bag, into the photograph’s frame, to capture our presence at this sunset, our participation in this memory, but he couldn't angle the lens properly to fit both our feet and the sun. So the photograph couldn't be manipulated to reveal the whole truth.

Other things the photograph forgot: my feet were cold, and I was surprised. The purple-bruised feeling of cold toes had already begun to fade in my seven-months in California-summer mind. My sleeping bag, the one pulled over us like a blanket, smelled like dust, from the night we spent in a tiny, blue tent, buffeted by gale-force winds, on his one-square-mile island, three weeks ago. The right side of my neck was beginning to ache, from leaning against his flat, hard chest and twisting towards the disappearing sun. I loved him, and still do, but that never shows in photographs, even when our feet make it into the print.

We timed it, counting in Mississippis until the entire sphere had sunk below the ocean's arbitrary line against the sky, but here's another thing no one told me about California: you can still see the sun through the ocean. I sat up then, startled, actively bewildered at the bizarrely obvious realization. I can see through water, and the sun setting is actually the Earth rotating away from it. The sun isn't giving up on us, on California, on the ocean or land, on me, and she waits beneath the surface. A glimmering reflection, the explosion in a watery mirror, remained, promising me she'd be back in eight hours, and my mouth hung upon at the sense of it all. Everything made sense. We had driven all the way out here and all the way across the country and all the way to the Big Sur, a place that doesn't really exists to learn that the sun never really disappears and to tell everyone else about it.

He laughed, at my expression, and because he was taken aback as well. "Wherever we make it to this weekend, that's what we tell people." He made me promise. "Tell them we drove to Big Sur to see the sunset."