Young Writers Society

The thing about that summer was everything felt like dreaming. Not the good kind of dreaming, either, where someone beautiful fell into your bed or you won the lottery or your dead grandma came back for your twenty-eighth birthday. It was the kind of dreaming where you stood over the cooktop with the sous vide in your granddad’s old beach house with the windows open and you couldn’t feel the kitchen tile underneath your calloused feet. The kind where you laid in bed naked and sticky and your lungs moved – inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale – but you didn’t breathe. The kind where morning came before you expected it, but by the time you realized it you couldn’t really even remember when it had been night.

On the good mornings, I was up before the sun with my backpack and a thermos of coffee. I’d leave through the screen door at the back of the beach house, pick up my sandals left by the bottom of the sagging stairs, and walk the winding wooden boardwalk to the beach.

I’d run away earlier that spring ‘cause I lost my job at the post office and sitting around my Chicago apartment only made me sad about it. Granddad always used to say, if you’re going to be sad might as well be sad at the beach. He’d died when I was twenty, three years after Gran, and left the place in my name with enough money set aside to maintain it without having to rent it out. Granddad hated tourists, and would have thrown a fit to find out his one and only grandkid was letting his private house out to spring breakers and young couples with honey moon eyes.

Most mornings weren’t good mornings. I’d lay under the hot, heavy comforter until well after noon imagining these huge, disembodied knives boring into my ribs until I couldn’t remember how much it would have actually hurt if they were real. I had to imagine that six or seven times before I could try to get myself up, and if I missed my opportunity I had to imagine it six or seven more times before I could try again.

After I got laid off, I called my parents and told them I didn’t know what I was supposed to do now. I couldn’t even leave the apartment; where the hell would I have even gone? My mother told me to get more sleep, do some yoga and think positive thoughts. My father told me to take my freaking medicine. He said things like that, “freaking medicine,” because his new wife had a five-year-old kid and he couldn’t say the things he used to say to me when I was a five-year-old kid.

That morning, I caught myself after the first seven disembowelments, but the coffee in the pot was still already cold when I poured it into my thermos. I set the pot every night, no matter what, to brew at six. If you didn’t turn the base off by ten, it turned itself off and your coffee got cold.

I drank a lot of cold coffee those days.

I screwed the top onto my thermos of cold coffee and splashed water from the kitchen tap onto my face. It was July by then, and already hotter than hell inside the house even with all the windows open. Granddad had never shelled out for HVAC, not even when Gran got sick. Outside, the air shifted and I exhaled into the breeze that shook the chimes I’d hung in the window over the kitchen sink. Somewhere to the south, out past Florida, a summer storm brewed. It wouldn’t hit the Carolinas if it even made land, but if I was lucky it’d do enough to cool the place down for the night.

I walked into the living room and flipped on the news, only staring at the weatherman for a moment before turning and leaving through the back door with the television still on.

The boardwalk to the beach was private, only accessible by the beach house and that was only accessible by a ten mile drive down a winding one-lane road. I assumed that if someone wanted to, they could walk an hour or so along the shore from the public beach and walk up the wooden boardwalk and murder me in my sleep. My mother would have told me to lock the doors, but I wouldn’t. No one had come to murder me yet, in the year I’d been living there, but there was always hope my luck would turn.

I picked up my sandals where they lived at the bottom of the stairs, but didn’t put them on. Granddad’s beach house was one of those raised numbers, though only half as high off the ground as it probably should have been. The underside was cluttered with old beach umbrellas and patio furniture that never got used, and the stairs off the back of the house let off in a moat of sand that circled between the house and acres of beach grass Granddad had planted from the house to the shoreline and as far up the road as he could afford to buy land. It rustled lightly against the boardwalk.

I crossed the moat to the short wooden stairs that lifted the boardwalk over the short dunes that rolled under the grass. It was a good half mile walk from the beach house to the water and I almost always needed to stop at the midpoint to catch my breath. I wasn’t fat or anything; even when I stopped delivering mail I only put ten more pounds on the one-thirty I’d carried since college. The sun just hurt, some, and my feet stung from being barefoot on the old weathered wood and the coffee was bitter and slowed me down.

When I stopped I looked back at the house, seafoam clapboard trimmed in white like someone had sketched it against the blue sky. With the sun high overhead and the beach grass drifting in the air, it set the house afloat.

My bare feet throbbed on the sun-bleached boardwalk and the sun throbbed against my temples until, finally, I tore my fingers through my hair – tangled, and caked in sand; no matter how long I showered I couldn’t get the fucking sand out of my hair – and dropped my sandals on the wood. I slipped them on, took a breath, and kept walking.

In the back pocket of my cut-off jean shorts, my phone buzzed with another reminder of the voicemail my mother had left me at eight that morning. I couldn’t be fucked to figure out how to turn off the reminders, so every five minutes since she’d called at seven the night before, my phone kindly pointed out that I was shirking the only real obligation I had left. If I didn’t call her back by seven that night, the county police and a team of paramedics would be at my door by eight. That had been the only deal I, a thirty-year-old adult woman, had managed to work out with my mom.

I pulled the phone from my pocket and flipped through to my voicemail. Georgia, my mother’s honey-sweet voice dripped through the speaker. Just thinking about you and checking in. Call me back when you get this.

My eyes burned in the sun, but I spun my back toward the beach – close enough the waves cresting toward the shore bled over the beach-grass-horizon – and snapped a picture of myself and a half-hearted thumbs up. Yoga on the beach today, I texted with it, hoping my mother knew little enough about yoga she wouldn’t wonder why I was out there doing it in one of grandma’s old cotton blouses with a thermos full of cold coffee.

Sounds fun!! she texted back, immediately.

I shoved the phone in my backpack and kept walking. When I worked for the post office, I loved to walk in the heat of the day. It soaked my uniform shirts with sweat and made me feel heavy. Now, the breeze off the water from the faraway storm cut through the heat and tangled my hair and shifted my grandmother’s baggy shirt around my waist and it was like I wasn’t matter. Didn’t matter. Hadn’t matter.

“Breathe,” I told myself. Inhale, exhale. My heart spun in my chest. I thought about whether I was getting bad again, whether I ought to call my mom and ask her to send a cab out to take me to the airport where I could buy a ticket and come back to Chicago.

Before I could let my head fall down that rabbit hole, I crested the wooden stairs that led up the last dune before the shoreline. There, in the middle of Granddad’s beach, my beach, was the grey lump of a whale sunk into the sand.

I dropped my backpack, wedged my thermos into the coarse, unkept sand at the bottom of the boardwalk stairs and walked up the beach.

“Oh, Jesus,” I said when I got close. The whale was small for what I imagined whales to be, just barely taller than me and I was a sold 5’5”. Brownish foam collected around its tail, still drifting in the shallow water. It bobbed, slowly, as the waves came in and washed back out. Its skin was still slick with seawater, and it huffed at me through its blowhole as if it had been waiting there specifically for me and I’d been running late. About time, Georgia. Now do something about this, it seemed to say as it fixed one of its black marble eyes on me.

I reached out and rested my fingertips on the whale’s rough, salt-wet skin. The animal made a sound like a moan. “Hold on,” I told it, as if it had a choice, and jogged back to my bag where I’d left it beside the boardwalk stairs.

I grabbed my cellphone and dialed the only number I could think of.

“911,” the operator stated, “what’s your emergency?”

Another wave crashed over the whale’s tail and the animal let out a long, dissatisfied groan. “I have a whale on my beach,” I told the operator. “I think it’s dying.”