Beachcombing


Fiction - by Rita Oakes



Mom asked, “Why don’t you ride your bike down to Barnacle Bill’s?”

“I thought we were going to the lighthouse today.”

“I’m sorry, Marcy. I need to finish this painting. Some of your friends from last summer could be at the arcade.”

Marcella hated being called Marcy. And she didn’t want to tell Mom that she didn’t have any friends from last summer. The ones she thought were friends had thrown the carcass of a rotting seagull in her hair and laughed when she freaked out.  No matter how many times she washed her hair, she couldn’t help but think she caught a whiff of dead thing.

She hadn’t wanted to go down the shore this summer. At sixteen, she was old enough to stay home by herself. But Mom would have none of that. “It will do you good to get away.” Yeah, right.

“I’d rather just stay in and read,” she said.

“What’s the point of coming here if you’re going to stay in the house all day?”

Exactly. Marcella picked up the book she was reading, a library discard about Eugenie Clark. “Fine. I’ll go read outside. Nothing like a healthy dose of skin cancer.”

“Don’t be so dramatic. We can go to the lighthouse another time.”

“But you promised we’d go today!”

Dad had proposed to her mom at the base of the Barnegat Lighthouse. And mom had painted Old Barney tons of times—it was the most recognizable symbol of the Jersey Shore. But somehow, they’d never climbed the two-hundred-and-seventeen steps inside.

Marcella shouldered her beach tote and let the screen door bang behind her.

It was just a block to the beach. Her flip-flops scraped on sand blown up onto the pavement. She thunked up the steps to the boardwalk, paused as a shirtless guy whizzed by on a bicycle, leashed lab loping beside. Dogs weren’t allowed on the beach. Guess the boardwalk doesn’t count. She made her way  to the pavilion to settle down with her book, but someone was already sitting there.

Some guy. Fortyish and broiled lobster red. She caught him looking at her as she walked by, that creepy old guy stare when a teenager in a swimsuit walks by. Jeez. She wasn’t even in a two-piece. Mom never understood why Marcella suddenly gravitated to middle-aged-women’s style swimsuits. Guys like this was why. She wasn’t even that cute, but that didn’t matter.

Like it didn’t matter when her boss at the pizza place backed her into the storage pantry and groped her breasts so hard she could see bruises for days; didn’t matter that he promised to give her more hours if she let him do her. It would be fun, he said. She wanted it, he said—he knew she wanted it. But she didn’t. Not in a dark closet that smelled of beer and garlic; not where other staff could walk in at any moment. Not ever.

She wrestled free of him and quit on the spot. Never mind it was her first job and she could use the money for her college fund. Never mind that her mother lectured her about quitting a job without giving proper notice and letting her coworkers down. She never told her mother about the groping incident. Mom wouldn’t have done anything about it, anyway

Marcella didn’t want to think about it—it would just make her mad and shaky and scared again. She gave the pavilion a wide berth and didn’t make eye contact with Creepy Guy. If she was  lucky, there wouldn’t be too many scumbags out on the beach this early. They should all be hungover and sleeping in from the night before.

She walked another block to the next break in the drift fence for a path over the dunes and down to the beach.

The beach, for a wonder, was practically deserted. The season hadn’t officially started yet. Behind her, recently planted dune grass waved in orderly rows. Marcella found a likely spot and pulled the beach towel from her tote, shook it out, weighed down two sides with a shoe each, the third with her book, and the fourth with the tote bag to secure it against the omnipresent breeze. She slathered on sunscreen, scowling at the rotten coconut smell. Why did sunscreen always have to smell so fake?

She sprawled on the towel and tried to read, but the words just didn’t  take her mind off  the lighthouse. It shouldn’t be such a big deal—after all, it wasn’t going anywhere, but mom had promised.

She tossed the book down. She may as well do some beachcombing. There’d been a storm last night, so maybe she’d get lucky. Some sea glass, or a rare shell unpecked by gulls to add to her collection. She pulled a Baggie from her tote—she always kept a few there just in case she found something interesting.

She plunged her toes in warm, white sand. She enjoyed the pull at her calves as her feet sank into loose grit and contrasting coolness between her toes as she reached the damp surf line tamped down by the retreating tide. The ground was pockmarked and if she looked closely, Lilliputian geysers betrayed the presence of piss clams below. Foam clung to the water’s edge and sandpipers comically darted back and forth from successive waves. No gulls shrieked.

The rhythmic surf tugged at the residual anger that simmered inside her, like a fisherman fighting with a troublesome catch. Perhaps mom was right to come down the shore, after all. She always said the waves were the heartbeat of the sea.

As long as the perverts leave me alone.

She wandered the spume-lined surf, slower and more deliberate than the sandpipers as she cast her eyes about for treasure. From time to time she would bend, pick up a shell, examine it, rinse it in the next wave before tossing it aside. If she wasn’t quick enough, the water would swirl around her ankles, cold and scrubby with tossed sand and salt or a slimy, snaky tangle of kelp. She found an unbroken scallop shell, a tiny piece of twisted wood, pale and smooth, a dark stone shaped almost like a heart, but pitted with holes from some unknown cause, and the black horned thing that people called a mermaid’s purse—which was actually the dried egg sac of a skate. Each item she rinsed and deposited in her Baggie. She had a glass jar at home with souvenirs from other summers, collected from the age of six. She was more particular now with what she kept, as the jar was nearly full.

Engrossed in the hunt, she was surprised to come upon the jetty. She glanced back the way she had come—her beach towel no longer visible. The shore, at least, remained blissfully empty of people. She might be the only human left on the planet.

Good.

Marcella clambered over the rocks of the jetty, careful not to slip on the slime of the algae-slick surface. She picked her way to the end, enjoying the slosh of water over stone and the occasional spray of an extra feisty wave.

Reaching the end, she perched herself at one of the larger boulders, dangling her feet where seaweed waved languidly like mermaid’s hair. Crabs skuttled. Still no shrieking, laughing gulls, just the rhythm of the waves as they crashed on shore, the tang of salt on the air, and that clean scent following a storm. Marcella studied a hermit crab pushing something around in one of the tidal pools, something pale. A sudden shaft of light broke through the clouds, giving the object a greenish cast. Not a shell, not something the hermit crab could move into. A piece of wave-polished quartz, maybe. Or sea glass.

She reached in and stole the treasure from the silly crab. It was cool from the water and smooth as worn velvet in her palm, nicely frosted from years tumbled by the waves. Vaguely egg-shaped or more torpedo shaped. Bigger than most pieces of sea glass she’d found before.

She admired it for a while. The interesting thing about sea glass was it had always been something else before. A liquor bottle. A vial of old-timey medicine. Someone’s discarded soda—whatever. Broken, tossed about, polished, fashioned by the sea into something different. She curved her fingers around it. I’d like to be fashioned into something different. Something impossible to ignore or disrespect.

Ultimately, it could be made into a bit of clunky jewelry, incorporated into a crafty beach-themed mosaic, or simply collected with other pretty things in her jar at home. This was a keeper.

Marcella returned to her beach towel and plopped herself down on her belly. She turned the glass in her hands. So smooth it was, warmed now with the heat of her palms. Such a lovely, soothing color:  greenish white or whitish green, or even sea grey, now with a hint of brown as if, chameleon-like, it was attempting to blend with the color of her skin. Seamless, matte, hard, it would make the rest of her shore treasures look like so much garbage. Maybe it’s a jewel. Or some kind of fossil.

A man-shaped shadow spread over her. “What did you find?”

Startled, she closed her fingers over the object as if guilty of something. She scrambled to her feet. “Just a rock.”

Creepy Guy. Chance meeting or had he followed her?

She scrambled, grabbed the beach towel, and wrapped it around her shoulders, dumping book, flip-flops, sunscreen, and tote into the sand. She clenched the gritty towel closed over her breasts with one hand while concealing her treasure in the other.

“Can I see?”

She backed up. “I have to go now.” She started shoving everything into her tote while keeping a wary eye on the stranger.

“I haven’t seen you around before. Are you staying close by?”

She wanted to tell him to get lost, even tell him something stronger, something using the f-word, but her tongue felt like a stone in her mouth. You were supposed to be polite to adults. “I gotta go. Bye.”

As Marcella made a hasty retreat, fear simmered into familiar anger. How dare he? Here I am minding my own business and he had to ruin it.

She paused on the street long enough to put on her flip-flops and glance behind to make sure he wasn’t following. I can outrun him if it comes to that.

He was still standing where she had left him. She took a different street anyway, toward the library, with its cute cupola and weathervane in the shape of a boat.

She hadn’t realized she was holding her breath. Her legs felt suddenly weak, so she sat down on the bench in the Reader’s Garden until the trembling ran out of her. The weathervane creaked in the wind as if to say, “Coward, coward, coward.”

“Bite me,” she muttered.

“Well, I never,” someone said.

Marcella glanced up to see a mother yank her toddler fiercely by the hand and pull him hastily to the parking lot as if Marcella were the vilest of creatures. Once Marcella would have blushed and stammered an apology for her language. Not today. She bared her teeth. Wasn’t talking to you or your precious bratling.

The venom she felt startled her. I was nice once. But where does that get you?

She sat long enough to reassure herself that Creepy Guy had moved on. When she returned to the beach house, she used the outdoor spigot to wash sand from her feet and her flip-flops before heading inside. She dumped her tote in the hallway and grabbed a soft drink from the fridge.

“That you, Marcy?” Mom called from the screened-in back porch. She had turned it into a sort of studio and was doing beach-themed watercolors from photographs. She was good enough to sell a few—even had them displayed in the local shops.

Which was great and all. But sometimes Marcella wished she would focus some of the artist’s eye on her daughter. She ground her teeth. “Yeah.”

“Ken called. He’s coming down tonight. Thought we’d get pizza.”

“I’ve told you. I hate pizza.”

“Everybody loves pizza.”

Marcella’s hand tightened on the soda can. She never listens. “You and Ken go out. I’ll just make a sandwich.”

She didn’t dislike her mother’s boyfriend, but she couldn’t say she liked him, either. He was boring, but at least he didn’t ogle her. And he would distract her mother from harping on her to go out and make friends. Besides, he always went out early and brought back donuts from Ob-Co’s in the mornings, even though it meant the inconvenience of driving back over the bridge to the mainland. Ob-Co donuts were fresh. And kind of famous. She liked the cinnamon jelly-filled ones best.

Marcella took a quick shower to scrub the last of the sand and salt and pervert’s oily gaze away. She pulled on her favorite pair of shabby cutoffs and a tee shirt. Refreshed, she plopped onto her bed. The ceiling fan whirred companionably above her.

Marcella dozed until the sound of Ken’s car crunching on the oyster shell drive woke her. A low-grade headache had settled into the back of her head. She had dreamed.

In the way of dreams, she could remember only a fragment:  lumbering through a lush, green jungle. Dragonflies the size of small planes. Bright flowers big as dinner plates. Things hiding among sun-dappled ferns. Weird, but not scary. Mostly she remembered power.

She grunted a greeting to Ken and her mom and retrieved the tote she had tossed so carelessly in the entryway. Retreating to her room, she rooted around and pulled the sea glass free. Still warm. Weird.

Marcella adjusted her pillows and nested into bed, holding the glass up to the lamp. The color kept shifting, depending on the light, holding something dark at the center. Color shouldn’t vary that way, should it?

She rubbed the stone over her forearm, finding it warm, yet satin-like against her skin.

Marcella thrust it beneath her pillow and lay back, trying to recapture her dream:  heat and green jungle and tumbling ocean waves. Something unseen between sun and shadow. Even as she dreamed, she marveled at not being frightened. She was searching for something, not hiding. Strength radiated through her. Power.

Which on waking, was how she knew it was a dream.

“Marcy!” her mom called. “Breakfast!”

Breakfast? Did I sleep the night through? She’d not even put her pajamas on. Her stomach growled.

Mom and Ken were already at the table with their coffee when she lumbered in, rumpled in yesterday’s clothes, her tangled hair hastily pulled back with a scrunchie. A platter of Ob-Co donuts smelled tantalizingly of yeast and sugar. She reached for the cinnamon jelly one when her mother said, “Marcy! What have you done to your nails?”

Marcella stared at her hands. Her nails, always short and a little ragged, were now long and tapered, talon-like. They had a brown-green color to them, like the alligators she had seen in the zoo. She flexed her fingers. She wasn’t sure, but was her skin changing, too? She didn’t remember her hands being so . . . scaly.

She snatched her hand back from the donuts, sprang from her chair. “How many times do I have to tell you not to call me Marcy!”

Rage filled her. To be honest, it was always there, simmering like pasta water getting ready to boil. The house felt too small to contain her, to contain the thousand and one insults she had swallowed meekly and not-so-meekly ever since she had started growing breasts. Like those stupid mammary glands made everyone else’s IQ drop twenty points. She roared in frustration, fled back to her room.

Marcella’s skin itched and her clothes felt too tight, like her body couldn’t contain her, either. She scratched her arm with her talons and realized her skin was turning the same brown green of her fingernails and had erupted in scales. I thought acne was bad.

She giggled, but it came out deep and throaty, like the worst bronchitis anyone had ever had.

“Marcy?” Her mother, outside her bedroom door, her tone worried, querulous.

“It’s okay, love,” Ken said, from the breakfast table. “Growing pains. But you could try to stop calling her Marcy if she doesn’t like it.”

Bless you, Ken. I could learn to like you, after all.

But she couldn’t let her mother see her like this. She’d whisk her off to the dermatologist and to see yet another therapist.

“Marcy—I mean Marcella.” Her mother knocked on the door. “Baby, are you okay?”

She wanted to say, “Go away!” but only another roar came out. The doorknob turned.

Marcella reached for the window. She would climb out and run to the sanctity of the beach. But somehow her taloned hands couldn’t manage the latch and she crashed through glass, wall, and the cedar shake siding. She should have been cut to ribbons, but she wasn’t. Marcella lumbered away, her bare feet now bearing talons of their own. Nausea soured her belly like she was looking out over a great chasm. Everything shrank before her. No, they weren’t shrinking; she was growing.

Dizziness. Like the one time she had ridden in a glass elevator and could see everything grow small as the car rose. She could see over the top of the house. Cars in the road were the size of dogs. One screeched its tires, and she flicked her tail in irritation.

Tail? The car spun and careened onto the sidewalk.

Her fingers had somehow merged into each other, leaving her with three massive claws on each hand. She passed the library, roared at it. The weathervane on top spun and squeaked at her breath, hurting her ears. She bit it, ripped it free, the metal bitter on her tongue. She tossed it aside.

The librarian will be so mad.

People gaped at her and bolted as she clumped down the boardwalk. She recognized the pervert from yesterday. She stepped on him. He squished satisfactorily between her three toes like a jelly donut. She bellowed triumph. No more would he make her wish she were invisible. No one would.

A dog barked. The bicyclist from yesterday. The dog strained at the leash, pulling the cyclist off balance. Hairs stood up along the animal’s spine from neck to the base of his tail and his legs were rigid. Marcella lowered her head, tilted it to one side as she eyed the dog. She blew out a puff of hot breath from her nostrils and the dog’s bravado vanished. The cyclist, sprawled on his backside, seemed frozen, mouth gaping in an O of disbelief. She could eat them both. One gulp or two?

Sirens wailed, distracting her. Distant, but coming closer, the noise a painful assault on her ears. The boardwalk trembled beneath her feet. People scattered before her, screaming. She belched a gleeful roar, relishing their fear. So many had made her feel small and helpless and insignificant. No more.

More sirens. Small men firing guns at her, pinpricks of pain on her skin, like when a cat kneads on your lap too enthusiastically. She whirled and swept them away with a lash of tail. She lumbered over the dunes, sand pleasantly hot beneath her three-toed feet. Her shadow accompanied her, rippling where the sand rippled, all mishappen darkness and impossibly long snout.

No boobs to ogle. She laughed, but it came out as another roar. She stretched into a run down the beach, awkward at first, but with greater surety as she gathered speed. Sunbathers fled in all directions like startled sandpipers. She snapped at them, more for amusement than for hunger. I like this new body.

The screams and sirens annoyed her, though. She stepped into the water, breakers sloshing about claws, ankles, knees. Gray-green waves tipped in white. Offshore, a deeper blue revealed the drop off. She waded out to where the bottom sloped away to darkness and began to swim, propelled by her powerful tail. Never had she been out so far or so deep.

Marcella could no longer hear the voices from shore, but the ocean was not silent. There was a thrumming of boats, of dredges, the clicks of dolphins, the singing of currents, and the far off thwop and whistle of whales. She surfaced enough to get her nostrils above water and took a breath before diving again.

The water was cold, but exciting. Schools of fish darted around her:  shad, mackerel, bluefish. She tore into them, gulped them in bloody pieces until she was full. She surfaced, glanced back at the distant beach. She’d swum parallel to the barrier island and now found herself at the southernmost tip. Across the inlet, the red and white lighthouse stood, a solitary sentry.

Marcella swam toward it. A lone surf fisherman gawped at her as Marcella clambered over the rocks and the concrete walkway, bending the metal safety railing. She grinned and he abandoned his gear, hastily climbing over the rail and sliding over wet stones before darting into the cover of cedar and holly and beach plum. Marcella made her way toward the lighthouse, tourists streaming before her. Some darted inside the lighthouse; others fled to the parking lot.

Marcella cocked her head, studying the light. It wasn’t as big as she thought it would be—only about five times her current height.

She stabbed her claws into the lighthouse and began to climb. Bits of broken brick showered in her wake. She paused at a tiny, narrow window and peered in with one eye. Tourists stared back at her, frozen in shock. Marcella snarled. People pushed each other in their haste to get away from the window. Marcella thrust a claw through the glass and seized one, a tiny-waisted woman with the perfect teeth and hair, who reminded her of the person who had thrown the dead seagull in her hair. Who pretends to be a friend and does something like that?

Marcella shook her, tried to pull a shrieking woman through the window, but the space was too small, so she came out in wet chunks. Marcella let bits of meat fall, resumed her climb.

At the top, the viewing platform around the lens bent beneath her weight. Metal squealed. Marcella grinned at the people streaming out of the lighthouse below. They scurried like cockroaches when you turn on the light.

Sirens resumed. Marcella flailed her tail in annoyance. Why did they have to make so much noise? She roared at them to shut up, but more sirens arrived from all over the island. And the mainland, too, from the sound of things. Above, the guttural whup-whup of a helicopter. They’re shooting at me!

She thrashed her tail. The lens and encasing glass shattered, falling in great shards. She shook them off.

Below, police cars, ambulances, and fire trucks flanked the lighthouse. A woman argued with a police officer while being restrained by a man.

“Stop shooting at her! That’s my baby girl!” She broke away. “Marcy! Marcy, it’s Mom!”

Marcella clambered down the side of the lighthouse. Haven’t been a baby in a long time

She bounded forward and snatched the woman in her jaws, biting down enough to hold her, but not enough to tear. The man shouted and pulled, but she plucked the woman free. And stop calling me Marcy!

She skurried back up the lighthouse, creating an avalanche of red and white bricks as her talons sought purchase. Between her teeth the woman struggled. Marcella deposited her on the remains of the twisted railing at the top. Marcella cocked her head, studying the woman’s white knuckles clutching the railing, the wet face, the mouth in its O of terror.

The woman reached out a hand. “Marcie—”

Marcella roared, the blast of her breath blowing the woman’s hair back like the blow of a gale.

“Marcella.”

Marcella blinked.

“Baby. You’ll always be my baby—I don’t care how old you get.” The woman placed a gentle hand on the underside of Marcella’s jaw. “You mustn’t hurt any more people. You see that, don’t you?”

Marcella cocked her head. Memories were fading, but there was the time the two of them got hot fudge sundaes at Hoffman’s,  the obvious pride when Marcella took first place at the science fair, the cool hand on her face when she had a fever. Good memories, fragile, clinging like sea foam to sand.

 

She bellowed. Without eating the creature, she darted down the side of the lighthouse, over the bulkhead railing, across the rocks, and to the cool waters of the inlet.

 

Swimming out to sea, far away from the broken lighthouse, away from men and their bullets and their creepy eyes, she would let the tumbling waves continue to batter her into something old and new and terribly beautiful.





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