The Sea Toucher: A Short Story
When the blue streak marks a horrendous end of a tiny coastal village.
I see Daniel for the first time when we stand on top of the cliff watching the wave crunch the below water. The foamy jaws flush in and out of the bay, shredded by the bizarre rocks.
That exploding power showed its true face to me some hours ago when I paddled out. The water wall rose with geared forces, thrusting downward to meet the underlying shallow reef. It hammered me down like a thin feather until I took a deep dive and slipped out of the smashing zone. My eyes were blurred in a trench of tear and the unknown resentment surged up my throat.
Daniel has this look of an experienced man savoring skeptical thoughts between teeth. The light in his eyes scrutinizes the person in front with odd clarity, quietly signaling that he knew what I was thinking or what was gonna happen ahead of me. Just like my uncle, who taught me to observe people's hands when they talked to differentiate lies from truths, constantly cracking fingers means they are anxious, shades between strong grips and shaking pointing.
"We don't go out when the water gets blue, right there," he aimed at the eddy where the flow in and out met.
"What?" I looked in the direction he pointed. What is that? - It is white, not so white, it has hair, no, the surface is almost white.
From the sand beach, three lifeguards jumped into the water, rushing toward the white piece of thing.
That thing is a woman. A body of a woman. Naked. Her hair is black and as long as the kelp extends and wraps around some parts of her pale body. The curiosity urged me to walk down the cliff to see her up close.
"Don't go; she would take people out," Daniel mumbles. It was the same when my uncle said he would come back and take me out of my father's house, "don't go now," my uncle threw the duffle bag on his truck and sped out of the red dirt road. I touched the cracked-open skin on my lips and smelled the salty blood.
"Who? She? She is dead." I squint at Daniel and walk away. I wanted to tell my uncle that he should not promise what he couldn't deliver.
The woman's left thigh has a giant purple bruise, staining her skin like a water spill. Something heavy kicked or punched at that area. A full force of violence. Her face is covered under kelp leaves as if the ocean wrapped a gift of curse and sent it to anyone retrieving her. My uncle never returned and my father broke my cheekbone when he threw a chair at me. I ran off the house, face buried in the palms, almost blinded in my blood and was picked up by an old lady who spent her weekend to feed me in the hospital bed. I couldn’t chew for some months. I knew how powerful a punch or a kick could cause on the body.
The lifeguard, with wide shoulders, slowly unwraps the kelps with his calloused hand. We, the public audience, follow his fingers. We have this urge to watch the performance of death. Yet, she has no face, or her face is just a thick and flat layer of skin with no hole to my eyes to hold onto. She is muted with no mouth, blinded with no eyes, and breathless with no life exhaling from any nose.
The wide-shoulder guard startled and took a step back. He almost fell on his back. "Just look away, please," Daniel breathes into my ears. He already stands behind me. Did people also look nonchalant from their windows and porches when my father beat me every night?
The ambulance arrives and takes the body away; the two nurses who put her body on the stretcher do not even ask about the fact she has no face. They just do the work as usual and leave in a hurry without looking back. The crowd dissolves into the purple sunset, as purple as the drowned woman's thigh. Daniel is no longer behind me.
I received a postcard from my uncle once, with the picture of the cliff, a world-class surf break. I searched it out on a map, some thousand miles from the factory I worked. He was having a good life. Beyond one postcard, I had never got any news from him. Then one summer, I received this mail forwarded to me by my father, asking me how I wanted to receive his ash. They could get the ceremony in the town if his family participated, or they could mail "him" to me in a special package.
My uncle turned out to be this opaque while marble urn fitted into one palm, with some notebooks and personal papers. The young man with loud and crispy laugh has become dirt in my hands. How can he discern if I am telling true or lie while his existence slipping between my fingers into the sea? - I had this amusing thought when scattering his ash from a fishing boat.
"Please don't let me stay at sea," one of his note writes. Too late, I whispered with a note of indifference for his leaving me behind.
Daniel is cooking a pot of clam soup outside when I walk by his small blue house, halfway from the beach to my dorm. He waves at me. He is cutting some beetroot, potatoes, and cauliflower on a wide cutting board.
Beetroot bleeds on the surface, and the pot steam billows toward the garden gate. Daniel opens the pot. The clams are cooked and open their mouths wide and clean. Even clams have mouths, that woman didn't; an absurd thought crosses my hair.
Daniels cleans the clams' mouths and puts cauliflowers in the pot. The soup will be sweet with clams and veggies. That assuring taste warms up my belly while the chilling wind intrudes the cooking spot.
"Did you see that as normal?" I struggle to make a conversation.
"Depending on how you define what is normal,"
"A woman with no face,"
"It has happened here every month for... how long, I don't know. Since I moved here, it has been normal, maybe even before the establishment of this village and that tourist town."
"How come nobody talks about that? Newspaper? TV? Vlog? Youtube?" I desperately list all the possibilities of exposing this abnormality to the world.
"Newspaper cares about news. This is by no standard "newsy" to this place. TV needs footage. You can't put dead body footage on TV, so they fade away apparently as they haven't ever existed. Youtube and Vlog, I haven't seen the light of them in this town. Could you enlighten me on this? Tourists? They haven't stayed long enough to see any of the norm. Normality is too mundane for tourists. And tourists don't need this to spoil their holiday. You just look away, and your holiday is complete with no stain of absurdity. For example, why are you here, holiday?"
"I come to claim my uncle's urn."
"Sorry for your loss."
Daniel lowers down the heat and fills a bowl of soup for me. He put the beetroots and potatoes in the griller. The red liquid sizzles and bleed out the juice. Like flesh, I think on the back of my neck.
We sit on the wooden bench. I sip the soup as he watches me slurp the clam and cauliflower pieces. Daniel put a piece of grilled beetroots in my bowl sweet, with a lot of juice, and my spine got a bit cold with the warm bite into the piece.
"Do you know the Rare Crystal Blade Factory?" I suddenly remember the company title in the letter they sent me.
"Yes."
"He worked there before he passed. Do you hear about any labor accident there?"
"Not that I knew of, did you uncle got an accident?"
"I don't know. The death certificate didn't state any reason."
We part when the last light is just a thin slit in the horizon. I take the shortcut up to the dorm. The staircases carved into the steep hillside will save me 30 30-minute walk on the winding paved road. A star glitters, and I walk toward it like a moonwalker, aiming for an elusive target.
Fuck, no, but that drowned woman's face doesn't leave me with that unquestionable ambulance. I take a sharp left in the middle of the staircase to the crevasse opening toward the waterfront. It is the higher layer cliff right on top of the cliff that I saw the girl. From there, I can aim toward that kelp bed where the body surfaced. I have a wider view from here.
There, on the rock tip of the cliff hanging below my feet, a crack large enough exposes a human, a man, working on something in the softened darkness under the moon sliver. I try to make out of the details of things in his hand. It has this bright shade glowing up while the other part sinks into black. He is combing. Hair. A body looks like a woman. A big wave rises as high as the cliff, shedding the moonlight on him. Not a woman. A seal. A dead seal with polished fur and a split tail.
Behind and in front of the man, a field of seal bodies with their curving flesh lie motionless, bathing in glowing moon. Are they dreaming or being dead? How did they end up here on this high cliff? Did the guy take them up? No, he can't. Each seal is as big as him, even bigger. The one he is combing is almost double him in side. I shake my head as the air gives way to this salty and pungent smell that stirs into the high wind.
He is combing, caressing the part of that lifeless wet fur body. His shoulders shook. I couldn't discern if it was his weeping sound or the calling of other living seals out there, calling this immense flesh field to wake up and jump into the arms of the ocean. He holds on to the seal's head and lets it lie down on earth gently. He takes out a piece of dress, a woman's dress, light in color and glittering a bit. He put the dress on the seal as the preparer dressed a human being before a funeral. He closes all the buttons up to the neck of the seal. Then he takes a step back and kneels down. He genuflects three times toward the sea.
Then he rolls the heavy flesh body in dress toward the cliff, weeping and pushing her into the ocean. The seal field is motionless as it is, ensuring all of them are dead because none has any saying about his act. His left leg is limping slowly into the depths of the hilly village side. And I can only see his shade for some hundred meters before he disappears into the foggy night.
"The sea is cursed. I can't imagine myself dip my feet into the water again. That water. Too blue. Water comes from everywhere, on my hand, in the pipe, on the eyes of others, in their mouths. Water dripped out from the CEO's noses the other afternoon. Can we avoid this consequence?," My uncle's diary wrote. The line was stained with some light blue water mark. Did he ever walk under the moon like tonight?
The next morning, the noise of the beach crowd penetrates the dorm windows. I open my eyes and walk toward what I already knew what it is.
Daniel grabs another body from the sea and took her to the beach. A lifeguard tries to do the artificial respiration to no avail. Daniel stops the guy from trying. The crowd scatters as the ambulance shows up. Everyone knows the drill.
I am tired; I look at the woman's face; I know it should be the face of a dead seal with whiskers and stubbed nose. I have this urge to show people what the man did in the dark last night. I want to confront the seal, which is dead, to reclaim its identity instead of being an un-faced woman. But I am too tired, my voice couldn't gather to form words. I am restless and almost fall down on my knee.
Daniel sees me and helps me back to his cabin. He asks me to stay and offers some seaweed tea.
"I saw everything last night, a man, the dead seals; he dressed it up and did some witchcraft and turned it into a woman. Why? Should I do a YouTube video about this? To tell the world all these drowned women are fake? that they are just dead animals?" I confront Daniel.
"Twenty years ago, this village was nothing like this, just a stretch of seaweed collectors' houses. They lived off the kelp forest and the sea grass, harvested them all year round,” Daniel chooses his words slowly.
“I came here in a summer, because I was a surfer and was on a long motorbike trip across the continent. I smelled the seaweed, dipped them into the chili sauce, munched them until the last bite, and decided to stay for a while, and then, for good. This same seaweed, their delicacy, is used to make the beautiful tea." Daniel puts a cup in my hand and pours some into it.
"The man you saw last night was a young kid back then. He took me to the point break where waves rose up, and underneath was a giant reef. I spent hours snorkeling around. I chased around the five-tailed blues, the earth mouth monsters, the hidden evil faces, the glassy pink princess, the punk rebel in red masks, those creatures he named. The seabed had music. The mumbling sound from the bloating mouth of the giant earth-mouth monsters. The whisper of princesses, the glaring shout of the punk rebels, the deep tonal songs of the green fin clans.
One morning, he and I went out on a surf. The sun was baking the ocean, warming the water layer by layer. The light slowly pierced the freezing dark underneath. The kid floated on the surface to soak up the sun. His body wanted to feel what the sea felt when it warmed up. I had never thought of how the sea felt before I met him. That warming sensation was transmitted from the water to our bodies.
Then, I suddenly saw a blue streak of liquid gathered under the surface. That was too blue to be the sea. It's too blue to be true and harmless. Too blue. An intense pungent smell suffocated my nostrils. I got panicked. I felt multiple hands and claws trying to hold me down into the depth and squeeze my lungs. All I could think was to swim toward the boy and take him out of that devil stretch. He already passed out when I reached him. I put him on the board and paddled back to the beach. My chest was so painful, and I breathed shallowly. I cried his name out. Wake up, man, young man, wake up, help me get us out of this. We need all the hands now.
When the board landed on the shore, I pulled him back on the sand, avoiding that blue liquid stretch spreading behind us. The further I moved away from the water, the less pungent the smell was.
Immediately, hee woke up and gasped. He vomited as if he wanted to take out a whole stomach. Only water came out. Too much water for a small person. But he kept at it. He spat out invisible things and visible water. Then, a giant slimy body churned out of his neck: that blue liquid. It lay on the sand for some seconds; that body of blue liquid was a transparent bundle, and it moved and leaned toward the kid, trying to get back into his mouth. It thrashed. I pulled the boy further away from that thing. The liquid stained my swimming trunk. Then it melted into the sand, blue-ed the sand with that nauseating smell.
When he got his breath back, I was looking at him, trying to discern if he was really back. His pupils were fixed on something behind me. That gaze was so horrifying that I had to turn around to look at the same direction.
In front of us, a whole sea surface of dead seals and seagulls was approaching. Hundreds of seals bloated. The birds' feathers were bluish. Seal bodies and seagull carcasses combined into odd giant flesh rafts with billowing blue feathers looming on the horizon. They moved according to the wave, up and down in rhythm, breathless, motionless. There was no sound except the breaking wash on the shore and the sound of the death.
I was in a hell that morning. That hell was close and vivid. It was not any kind of hell I had read in Dante or the Bible before since those hells were futile imaginations. The sea was dead as quick as I blinked. And it was real."
Daniel swallows some tea and coughs as though some feather bundles stick to his throat.
"Thousands of drowned women's bodies," I mumble.
"You asked me what happened. That was what happened. The man you saw tasted the real death. He just does what he was told to do by the doomed ocean: The Sea Toucher."
" Why don't you go out and tell people those drowned women are not really human but dead seals," I feel like vomiting.
"Do you think that would change anything? Nobody cares about this part of the village. Human or non-human. Seals or women. Does that matter? How would a dead seal make death weigh less than a woman’s death? How do you evaluate existence on this manufactured ladder of importance? That blue streak did kill everything inside here, right here, out there, every bit of everything I used to love!" Daniel gets upset; he stands up and points at his chest. Then he leaves the table.
I feel like vomiting.
I look into the teacup he gives me. The blue water.
"We get good salary. I thought of settling here and bringing my niece over. The executive wanted to extract the crystal bed behind the breaking point, where the waves were most hideous and unpredictable. It was a rare element, the game changer, it would change everyone's life on earth, our proximity of perception, life length, brain alteration, emotion shifts, the imagination can leap forward the unimaginable. The drill went too deep. The blue crystal came out. We couldn't close what we bursted open. That blue thing is eating my heart membrane." I threw my uncle's notes into a burning trash fire so as not to remember I used to hope and hope so much until no hope was left in my drained throat. My uncle left me and didn’t think twice that I would be broken in the hands of my father, the monster that gave birth to me.
I need to vomit.
I need to vomit this thing out.
What is hell, Daniel?
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