“Autumn is coming and you know what that means.”

     “No.”

     “Oh.”

     “Aren’t you going to tell me?”

     “No, I don’t think so. There’s no fun in that.”

     These were the sort of conversations I was having with my sister recently, sitting on a dock at Lake Michigan, smoking our father’s cigarettes and counting the seconds between each seagull squawk. She said that you could tell how hungry they were by how often they cried and I decided this was probably a lie. She had also told me my grandfather was a satanist and in the S.S.

     Back in town, grampa was buying a skin mag with gramma; they got this idea that if they kept acting fun and stupid and lustful, they’d stay young forever and as far as I could tell it was working.

     I could count to twelve between each squawk.

     “Birds can’t burp. That’s why they don’t let you throw rice at weddings anymore. They just blow up, poof!, like a pillow fight,” she made exploding motions with her hands, “but with casualties.”

     Ten seconds.

     “That’s disgusting.” I blew smoke out my nose in exclamation. It burned a little.

     Four seconds.

     “It’s exciting! Have you seen pictures of the Hindenburg exploding?”

     “The what?”

     A wall of noise crumbled down from the sky, a broken music box with every out of tune. The seagulls dove to a half-eaten McDonald’s meal by the parking lot, carelessly thrown from a car window, and ascended again as quickly, leaving only poop and upturned sand in their screaming wake.

     “Existential despair.”

     “What?”

     “No, it’s mainly greed.”

     “What?”

     “Just describing the life of a seagull.”

     “Oh. Is that any different from us? We’re stealing smokes from dad’s closet and gramma and grampa are ignoring us with their touchy-feely, lovey-dovey stuff all the time.”

     “I feel like there’s a lesson in all of this,” she said, staring absently at the waves. “Maybe not.”

     It was getting dark as we walked back down the beach and up the long staircase to the deck, each squeaky step an echo of the seagulls’ bottomless gluttony.

     The back door squealed like usual and the house was silent except for a rhythmic tapping down the hall where grampa and gramma’s room was. We backed out and lit two more cigarettes as the wind picked up to a dull rumble.

     “One day we’re going to find them naked, tangled in bed sheets and dead from heart attacks, smiling like children,” I thought aloud while she listened to the wind with her mouth open slightly.

     She said, “This is probably pretty serious,” and I just started laughing.

     That night we slept on the beach and made up noble stories for all the birds who died at weddings.