It hadn't seemed important at the time, but soon the dildo, seen at the high-tide mark on the beach one Tuesday after work, began to affect how people thought about Devon.
He told Pat who told others in their friend circle. Flotsam and jetsam envy set in. Sam had once found a cream and green tackle box. Millie fished out a tarpaulin that was drifting in the lagoon one Easter weekend (if it was yet to make landfall, did it even count?). George recalled mundane plastic objects she had picked up (cups, bags, forks, bottles, straws, etc.), which evoked dying sea creatures, turtles mainly, and made her cry.
Everyone admitted that nothing came close to discovering a dildo.
The dildo soon prefaced introductions. Sometimes Devon would be waiting for a beer at a bar and a stranger would ask him: “Aren’t you the guy who found the dildo?” People stopped asking how his week had been. They only wanted to talk about the dildo.
Speculation spread about the moment of discovery. Some imagined it half-buried in the dunes. Others presumed it was made of glass, smoothed by the surf and sand, glinting in the sun. His cousin Olivia was adamant it was tangled in seaweed. Not a thick kelp, but a delicate variety, the one with the bladders. She imagined a shaft festooned with the floats, the fronds, the blades, all tangled but doing little to cut the electric purple. In the staff cafeteria, a colleague catastrophised the dildo. She located it at a beach carnival with pony rides, casting it as the villain who ruined the scavenger hunt. In more outlandish tellings, it was held aloft briefly by an inquisitive gull, balanced on the nose of a clever seal.
Many questioned how the dildo came to be on the beach. Had it been abandoned after an erotic picnic, washed out with the tide along with the remnants of a potato salad and the discarded shells of hard boiled eggs only to be dumped back by a wave the next day? Could it have fallen from the interisland ferry? Had it been tossed into the sea near the toilets at Princess Bay and bobbed around through the marine reserve? George was just relieved that it hadn’t ended up in the stomach of a dolphin or a whale.
As the life of the dildo expanded, Devon’s own identity narrowed. Now commonly known as The Dildo Guy, he wondered if there were other Dildo People. He hadn’t been the only one on the beach that evening. There must be others who, like him, were unhurried, out to enjoy the sea air and feel nature’s restorative power. If they had seen it, they too must have told at least one person and met with this same fate. In short, Devon wished the dildo had never entered his life. But it had. And a washed-up phallus, it turns out, is like a black hole. You cannot escape it
