From Sodden Shores
By Gresham Cash
The skull formerly belonged to a dolphin or small whale. It couldn’t be a shark—they don’t have bones. I was tempted to raise the mass of dripping flesh from the pebbled beach but couldn’t find any reason to do so. So I merely hunched over the mysterious face of the recently passed cetacean and wondered if I should start praying for my end to be gentle.
The beach was cold because the water was deep and the air blew from the north. I was almost positive that I was looking straight at England but was probably more in line with Greenland. I realized that no one would really care which it was because both countries were too far out of reach to matter. Along the beach, bones, sticks, and bottles littered my way. I was sure that I’d come to the right beach. Tessa said: “Camping La Paz.” I turned to glimpse the skull again and a raven had buried its head inside the whale’s eye socket.
I meandered up the hill once the tide threatened to strand me on the beach. In my rental car, I had a short surfboard and wetsuit. The sun was not quite setting. It was the time of day where you both want it to go on forever or just end right then. From my grassy perch, I saw the sun smoothly fall beneath the dark green trees that shot from the northern coast of Spain.
Tessa chimed in with a text saying: “Two hours away.” We weren’t afraid of distance. In fact, Tessa told me that it was healthy. Time well-spent is always more important than too much time feeling on the fringe. I wondered what it would be like to live without parents. Tessa’s died when she was young. A strange bacterial infection from water.
She went to university in Valencia then did a masters in Barcelona. She was working in Bilbao measuring the amount of permanent damage the historical industry of the area did to the river. Lots and lots of dead fish, dying people. All the things we take for granted. She laughed at me for talking about blood diamonds. Almost everything else we were doing on earth was killing us. Once, I sat on a bench at the Guggenheim in Bilbao and watched as sparrow after sparrow flew into the enormous glass wall.
Tessa occasionally called me, mildly upset, because she was worried that she wasn’t a good daughter while her parents were living. I asked her how much good we can actually do by the time we are fifteen. Every time, I was unable to comfort her because I still felt fifteen. It was like everything that I dreamed of at that point in my life had become suspended around me, as untenable as flower petals blowing from cherry trees. I cursed when I was sixteen, realizing that reality would prevent everything I thought a year earlier.
She was a beautiful sculptor but gold prefers data over another rendition of Dionysius. San Sebastien had become prohibitively expensive; Bilbao didn’t have the energy we needed. Tessa shaped a dolphin from a small piece of marble. “It’s a good luck charm. You’re as smart as a dolphin.” I grinned at her pleasant way of encouraging me.
An hour left before Tessa arrived, I stretched my wetsuit over my cold body. I grabbed my board and walked barefoot back to the beach. A pair of young women sat by the bottom of the stairwell that was now under water. I said, “Excuse me,” as I sidled past them directly into the water, slightly worried that my foot would cave through the face of the dolphin.
The skull drifted back and forth in the surf, unseen to me, unknown to the pair of women, and I paddled through the crashing waves just to get beyond the breaker so that I could imagine not having parents and still wanting to live, too.
THE END
Author Bio: Gresham Cash is a writer, musician, and filmmaker from Athens, Georgia. His work can be read at Popshot Quarterly, Litro, Wilderness House Literary Review, Litbreak, and Trampset.