Gulls of the Algarve by Matt Barrett

*THE BLUE FROG 3^rd PLACE WINNER*

At the end, our father existed in two places at once: the first was where he was, in bed with a nurse tending to his whims and my mother bringing him water and my sister and me gathered around when he wasn’t telling us to go and be useful somewhere else, and the second was on a quiet beach in the Algarve, beside a gull with a broken wing as the tide began to rise. Only it didn’t have a broken wing, it was just too tired to fly, which happens sometimes, even to gulls who otherwise look okay, even when nothing seems wrong with their wings at all.

No one could explain why my father was sick, other than he was eighty, which wasn’t that old to be sick, but not that young to not be sick either. Doctors said it had to do with his lungs, then not his lungs, that it was in his bones, then not his bones, that tests would clear things up before all of them came back empty, or maybe it had to do with his brain, until his brain looked strong, or his nerves, until his nerves worked fine, and did any of us believe in the power of prayer, or for the more cynical, that maybe it was just his time? He was eighty, we told ourselves, despite believing eighty was still young, that Harrison Ford is over eighty, that Barbara Streisand’s over eighty, that hell, Julie Andrews is almost ninety, and if nothing’s wrong with them, why should anything be wrong with him? But there must have been something wrong because otherwise he wouldn’t have been lying in bed with a nurse tinkering with his medicine, and his eyes would have had more color, his skin would have been less dry, and he wouldn’t have looked so pale, so hurt, so ready for this to end, so there had to be something wrong with him, despite how little his insides showed it.

Which brought him back to the gull. The same common gull you’d find just about anywhere, or at least anywhere near water, salt water, with a white head and yellow beak and a black-and-gray behind that probably spent its day begging for food or digging through trash or any of those annoying things people associate with gulls, only this one was on the sand, lying as the tide rose, unable to stand or fly no matter how many times my sister and I nudged it, no matter how many times we touched it, which had been a goal of ours for years, to run so fast we actually caught one, only to realize we’d never get this close if things were actually right.

Our father motioned for us to lean in close.

“I’m like that gull,” he said. He paused to catch his breath, a tube in his nose and IVs in his arms, administering God-knows-what to cure God-knows-what despite none of us believing in God at all.

We had seen the gull from a distance, sitting alone in the sand, even as girls played soccer nearby, as boys with pails dove into the ocean, and when our father bent down to check its wings, for fishing line or broken bones, it looked back at him, as if it were simply happy to sit.

The ocean lapped at the seagull’s belly, pushing its feathers back. We wondered if we should move it—to the dunes, where it would be safe, beneath the cliffs of fossilized shells, but when we held it in our hands, the seagull squawked as if in pain, so we laid it where it was and our father sat beside it, as the rest of us went off to play, and each time we looked back at him, our father was still there, his arms draped over his knees, with that little gray head beside him.

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So much of life is about waiting, I think, for what you know will happen next. From his bed, our father told us to take ourselves to lunch or to the movies, to do anything other than wait here, when there was so much we could do, but we remembered when he sat in the sand, his bright red swim trunks on, his tanned, strong arms, waiting beside the gull that could not move. And as the tide rose, he stayed with it. As it buried his ankles, he stayed. And when the ocean finally found the strength to lift the seagull off its feet, he followed it into the sea, where they floated a while, the two of them side by side, rolling with the waves.

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MATT BARRETT — Matt holds an MFA in Fiction from UNC-Greensboro, and his stories have appeared in The Threepenny Review, The Sun, West Branch, Cincinnati Review’s miCRo Series, TriQuarterly, Wigleaf, Cutleaf, The Forge, SmokeLong Quarterly, Best Microfiction, and Best Small Fictions, among others. He teaches creative writing at Gettysburg College and lives with his family in Pennsylvania.

Art by JIKSUN CHEUNG — Jiksun is a painter and writer from Hong Kong. His stories have been published and recognized in the SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction, The Molotov Cocktail Winner’s Anthologies, Wigleaf, Atticus Review, and elsewhere. His art is forthcoming in Barrelhouse, Short Story, Long, and a mystery novel to be published in 2025.