The Path

I give to you a story in eleventy-one words...

The purple-orange waves lapped against the gray rock’s worn crevices. In twenty minutes the rising tide would consume the thin path leading back to the mainland.

He didn’t care; he preferred the dangerous simplicity of the wet, jagged limestone. His right hand leaned on a book he had read, a simple tale of love by a long-dead German author.

‘What happens now, I wonder?’ he inquired of the encompassing water and failing dusk. ‘Shall I make my home on this wind worn boulder?’

‘If you wish,’ came a voice between the wind. ‘But you don’t want that.’

‘What do I want, then?’

The ocean swallowed the last remnant of the path.