Wake

in which a boy on a beach faces a tsunami or is it a knuckleball.

Who could imagine this calm, blue sea throwing skyscrapers at boys on beaches on the other side of the world in anger,

passion, both. You play a good game of it; in Your easy, self-effacing way, You say, I'm no match for a knuckleball like that, as if it weren't Your knuckleball all along, while I consider the fact that this dangerous pitch has come in the shape of an endlessly wide thirty-foot tall wall of water

barreling over this innocent or guilty island, and when the single body of ten-thousand teenage soldiers slams its boots into the sand, the wall continues its crush and destruction. You don't stop it. The wake behind the wave rolls from trough to surge. Thousands of held breaths are the last.

At least the men carried the good fortune to be green, never to have thought of this end-of-the-world beach, which I say is Yours and why—

hundreds of ball games; the beaches; a Ferris wheel; the girls; a bright warm sunny day just like this one passes before the young soldier now—the life h…