Bourbon. Shannon Lee
reached the shore. Whales were bringing children into the cove. Well, as close as they could. The inflow of the current seems to bring the bodies fully to shore thereafter. It took me awhile to figure on the whales, what with the dark and all, but their blowholes are relatively easy to see and hear with the right moonlight. Sure enough, bodies always showed up the morning after I saw whales. I still cannot fathom how they manage to do it. Mama insisted that I bring her along one night. That pissed me off something fierce, that being my secret and all, but I was afraid she would find a way to prevent me from going if I refused.
“Dear glory Gemma, those gentle beasts are returning those babies to the land.”
“I know it, Mama, but I can’t figure out why.”
“Seems to me, my girl, the gentle beasts are simply returning them home.”
“Why would they do something like that?”
“Can’t know for certain. Maybe they are preserving the children while their souls are in transition before some predator tears them apart.”
I told Frankel about the whales. I like the idea that something bigger than us cares about the weakest of our species. I never have believed in God, I just can’t make sense out of an entity that can be everything and nothing all at once. Pick asshole. Maybe the whales are the closest thing to God I can figure on. I was disappointed there was no pattern to the bodies appearing, and I thought about not returning to the beach, but the whales started pulling me closer to them without doing anything at all. Maybe that is what God is like to some folks.
The bodies of the children fascinate Frankel more than the whales, but we share in the exploration, each for our own reasons. I suppose Frankel is working something out with whomever his God is, as well. I think the bodies are macabre, what with their swollen faces, and the flies, those blasted flies… the sound of them buzzing and humming, landing on an eyelid or the nose of a small child that can’t defend themselves of it. I wonder what the insides of them look like, are they rotted like Mama’s peaches, or are their hearts still somehow whole and preserved? They sure smell rotten.
“I think they are fascinating.”
“I think they stink.”
“Have some respect Gemma, Jesus.”
I like when Frankel is frustrated because he lowers his head and looks up at you with his big hazel doe eyes and gently shakes his head. I’m sure he gets that look on to express indignation but all it does to me is make my heart race and my tits harden. It doesn’t much matter to me what we do; if the whales stop bringing dead kids to the beach I would be equally as excited to find some other new excursion with him. My biggest worry is that we won’t always be able to find a new adventure that will keep Frankel interested, and that he will drift away and be lost to me before the very end. So I hold my breath when the smell of the bodies creeps up and I count to ten, one hundred, one thousand if necessary, just to give me that time with him. I beg the whales, please keep bringing the bodies. If there is a whale god, I ask it to please let me stand in the sand of this dream until the sky bleeds down around us into the sea and washes us away from the imprint of history.
~~~
The brilliance in having no real future is that people stop acting like pricks. Well, for the most part. School stopped holding sessions soon after we all learned of the great end. Stores eventually closed because no one wants to work, and those giant towers in cities with names I can’t pronounce emptied out quick as June lightning. It didn’t matter much to anybody that there is no definitive timeline to when the end is coming. “People have been looking for permission to relax and just be people,” Mama would say, “The Universe gave us that permission. It’s a gift.”
There were wars for awhile after we learned of the great end on some other corner of the planet where the people supposedly cared more about the end, but it didn’t last. Not even the local LEO’s stayed operational. It wasn’t but a few months after that one freakish snow day in December years back when they were harassing Frankel that most the officers resigned and threw their badges into the sea. It doesn’t make much sense to me, everyone is going to die one way or another before we all found out about the great end, and thatdoesn’t seem to give people permission to just be humans. “You gone on and figured it all out, ya did, my girl.”
Sure doesn’t feel like it.
Mama planted a small orchard of mature peach trees in the wake of learning about the great end. That doesn’t make sense to me either - fruit is rotting, what is the point in planting trees that yield damaged fruit? Mama says most things of importance don’t stop being beautiful or desirable just because they are destined to be short lived. And peaches have always been important to Mama. Says she wants to enjoy them straight up to the end, that she wants her last moments to be of me in her arms with a mouth full of peach flesh. Gimme a break here Mama, please. Her death day fantasy keeps me awake on the nights I don’t visit the whales, simply put because I want to be with Frankel at the very end. But how can I leave her alone? What sort of kid doesn’t want to be with their mama when they die? Maybe I can somehow work it out for us all three to be together. I’m confident as morning’s rooster though that if I leave her she will hunt me down in the afterlife and hitch her buggy to my horse for at least the next three thousand years.
In anyway, Mama always has people that help her to manage the workload of her little peach plot. There isn’t much to it, in all honesty, but she shares the modest yield and so there are always people with less than ourselves willing to help out as they pass through for the exchange of her surplus. What with all the stores having closed, most every family with food producing land around here share their yield, ‘cept for Cebil Marons further down from the Gulf. Mama says he tried to throw himself in front of a workhand’s tractor after his wife died fifteen years ago, and that the injuries left him angry and violent. Black cherry colored heart of bile and grief. When I see Cebil in town I think the deep scars on his face look like fat earthworms trying to eat their way up his skull. “Be kind Gemma.”
“I like earthworms, Mama.”
A lot of people started moving around after news of the end. It seems people didn’t want to waste no more time living in places they don’t love. As time passed a natural order took hold and people organically divided themselves into either home-dwellers or nomads. Home-dwellers provide temporary shelter, and often food. Nomads provide a service industry, and sometimes material goods they pick up and swap along the way to wherever it is they are going.
I always thought Mama and I would chase the wind and drift into the nomadic life given all the exploring we done when I was younger, but something changed, something mysterious to me. I used to think maybe it was as simple as Mama’s love for her peaches, but I catch her from time to time looking with a haunting desire out to where the sky touches unknown temptations, as if she is missing someone, or wants desperately to be somewhere else.
~~~
I think memory is a bizarre thing. I’ve been writing my thoughts and memories out here on these pages for the last few months because Mama said penning our stories is important. I have yet to feel the importance of it. What I do feel is confused, as if my memory has taken on a life of its own. I feel that my mind might not be trusted to remember correctly.
Take for instance the morning last week when I went down to the cove to meet Frankel and found his body had been washed up on the shore with three other wave-walking children. There are times when I play it back in my mind and can recall the small details, such as the clothing some of the other children wore- for example, I seem to recall that the smallest girl had on a pink dress with lace trimming that looked like it was in real fine condition before she walked into the waves. She was maybe five years old. I remember wondering about her life, wondering if she was crying when she walked into the waves, and who she died with. Her hair was dark brown and long. I admired the color of it just before I caught sight of Frankel, but the shock of seeing him made everything in my head feel like liquid after that.
For some time after I found his body I couldn’t recall the details of what he looked like laying there on the sand. To be honest, I can’t quite