Friday, May 23rd, 1997
“Just look at that sunrise!”
Mireia spread her arms, as if to embrace the delicate pink hues of dawn, her shrill exclamation cutting through the early morning quietude of Edisto Beach, South Carolina.
For the fifteenth time in the past hour, Bernard regretted going along with his best friend’s plans.
“You’re not even paying attention,” she pouted, “It’s not like that nest is going anywhere.”
“I have a job to do,” he said. Then he doubled down on his task, pushing a wooden t-shaped probe into the fine sand between the windblown dunes. It was soft at the surface, but compact and unrelenting just inches below. If he was lucky, the probe would eventually give, and he’d find a Loggerhead sea turtle nest.
Mireia Durant was eighteen and excited to be out of high school, and that was it. There was nothing about his job she found thrilling, unless there were actual turtles around. She was here to see the beach. After that, she had gifted herself a luxury weekend in Downtown Charleston, to which he and his cousin Jesebelle had been invited. The proposition excited him—she’d been saving since 10th Grade—but right now she was driving him crazy by being loud and distracting.
“I’m so going to buy a new dress, tomorrow!”
He rolled his eyes, “Oh, goody. I’m going to spend all weekend watching you try on clothes.”
She set her hands on her narrow hips, and walked toward him, brown eyes staring him down. “Look, I said you could pick half the restaurants, and I’m paying for the room!”
“With your parents’ help—hey! Back off the crawl!” He jabbed the probe in her direction, as her feet kicked up sand over the tractor-like flipper marks of the prospective mother Loggerhead.
“Okay, okay, fine,” she sighed, stepping back, “You’re walking all over it.”
“I’m the only one who should be!” he grunted, pushing the probe back into the sand. Still nothing. He was glad he’d found the site before any tourists did. The sun was only just clearing the horizon, its soft pink glow still painting the dawning sky, so most of them were either still asleep or just now waking.
Every morning, he rose near dawn to search the beach for sea turtle nests. Then he marked them off with wooden stakes, orange tape, and a yellow sign warning others that it was illegal to disturb them. In some areas, a stiff plastic mesh was used to keep raccoons out, and he’d once used it after seeing evidence of someone’s dog sniffing around.
Part of his job included checking other nests to be sure they were still in good shape, and look for signs that they’d be hatching. Then, if he was lucky, he’d get to witness the event around two months later, on a night spent steering tourists and their flashlights away from the babies. The hatchlings were drawn to bright lights, instinctively gravitating towards anything that looked remotely like the moon. More than once, it had been houses and streetlights, and the tiny turtles had been found tragically crushed on the road in the morning.
Each nest could easily contain more than one hundred innocent little lives that were unsuited to the selfish wants of human civilization. That was far more important to him anyone’s vacation. Even his best friend’s.
“I don’t think there’s anything here,” she said.
He responded without looking up, “I’m obligated to try. It doesn’t look like there is, but stranger things have happened.”
“Well, hurry up. I’m here to relax.”
He waved a hand impatiently back toward the spot where she’d left her belongings, “Then go, ‘Rei, if it’s that important to you. I don’t see why, though. Last I checked, you live on a creek. You see the same sunrise and the same water every morning.”
“This is different,” she insisted.
She smoothed her hands over her sage green sundress and willowy frame, and swept back her thin, dark hair as she surveyed the rest of the beach. The Point at the southernmost tip of the beach was a long walk, but Bernard was one of the youngest volunteers, and he had the stamina to cover the ground quickly.
“Why don’t I finish the walk for you?”
He shook his head, “I have to do it.”
“I can’t believe you’re wearing tennis shoes and jeans, at the beach.”
“I’m not here to play.”
He’d known her his whole life—their mothers were college friends—and this was a side of her that was new to him. He couldn’t wait for it to be over.
She reached into his canvas beach bag, “Well, is there anything I can do to help?”
“Yeah, when I find this nest, you can go back to the car and get the markers.”
She glanced back at the lightening sky.
“I’ll be done before you know it,” he promised.
She rubbed her pale arms. “I should have brought an umbrella.”
“It’s Early May. You’ll be fine.”
She glared at him, “Says you. You don’t burn. And I hope I’m there the day you roast, Sparky.”
“Dad’s genes have gotta be good for something.”
When he wasn’t feeling self-conscious about it, on most days he felt blessed to have darker skin than Mireia or his mother’s family, as he liked to believe his father’s Asian-Pacific genetics would protect him from the sun’s rays—at least for now, while he was still young and the planet still had an ozone layer to speak of. It wasn’t as though Terry had left him anything else.
He tried to find the nest a few more times, and finally tossed the t-probe aside, crossing his arms as he stepped back to study the site.
Some mothers were neat and tidy. They picked a spot, dug it out, made a nest, and left the way they’d come. It was an impressive feat, given their size and the intricacy of the nest. This one had trekked through Hell and half of Georgia for a spot, and it was unclear if she’d ever made up her mind. If anyone else had walked over it before he had, it would have been impossible to read.
“At least we’re almost to the end.”
“Yeah,” he responded, trying to be patient, then added pointedly, “and I shouldn’t have to relocate this one if it’s here.”
One might think a man with a plastic shovel or a clam shell could dig a hole in the sand as well as any big, bulky turtle—and they’d be wrong. A mother turtle’s hind flippers were dexterous and powerful, and could carve out a perfect inverted lightbulb without ever once setting eyes on the nest.
“I wonder if it was too soft.” He pushed his foot into the sand and looking around at the hills and flowing bunches of sea oats she had crawled around. “Or maybe she just didn’t like the spot.”
“Maybe,” Mireia agreed, watching him, “I wish I could do this every morning.”
“You wish you could come out here and play every morning. I wish I could live thirty minutes closer to school.” At least if he lived in town, he might have some kind of a life outside the weekends like a normal kid.
She set her hands on her hips, “Well, get your grades up, and you can go live at school when you graduate.”
He stared up at her, “You’re the only person I’ve met who can make college sound like Hell.”
Her jaw dropped, “That is not what I meant, and you know it!”
“I’m just kidding! Jeez. Yeah, getting to see another town and not having to drive to class. Sounds great. Not having to take another of mom’s programming classes also sounds great.”
“You going for IT?”
“Fuck, no.” He picked another spot, even though it seemed even less likely than the first one, and pushed the probe back into the sand. “The occasional repair is great for pocket change, but I don’t want to sit at a desk for a living. I already hate doing it for school. I was thinking about wildlife biology.”
She crossed her arms, smirking, “Study harder, and you might get into Clemson.”
They had friends who would never forgive him if he applied to the state University. He knew as well as anyone that college football loyalties could make or break friendships and families around here.
Still finding nothing, he leaned on the probe, grinning mischievously, “I was thinking of applying to USC just to spite people. And Omaha, just to please my mom.”
They both knew he wouldn’t. He didn’t plan on attending either one, so it wasn’t worth the effort—or the application fees. There were plenty of other colleges across the state to choose from, many of them decent and all of them more affordable than going out of state.
“You could apply to Furman and we could maybe go to school together. Maybe not with a 2.8 GPA, but you’ve still got a year to fix that.”
She’d been digging at him over his grades ever since he’d gotten his scores back, and he was tired of it. Algebra and English had brought him down.
All he really wanted to do was take a year off, but it wasn’t an answer most people would accept from him. The consensus was that if he didn’t go now, it would be harder to go later, and there was no sense in delaying his career. He saw no reason why he couldn’t spend a year doing odd jobs on people’s computers and working the occasional day here and there with his stepfather’s construction business, making some extra cash for college while he spent just one more summer volunteering with sea turtles, all without the added pressure from school.
Mireia was more than familiar with this dreamy vision of his. “Maybe you can take that year off to find your dad.”
He leaned on the probe, giving her a level stare. Terry had left when he was two, presumably for some other woman. He was gone, and that was the end of it. The one picture Bernard had of his father was in his room in the back of a book, where he knew his mother would never see it by accident. That photo was the only proof he had of his heritage, and that was the only reason he’d kept it.
None of this was worth wasting his breath to tell Mireia things she already knew.
“All you have to do is ask for his address! Or his phone number! You know she’s got it, or at least his parents’ number, and it’s not like she has to talk to him, herself! You’re seventeen, dude. Don’t you want to find out where he’s been?”
“He’s had fifteen years to call me. If he wanted to talk, he’d have done so, by now. You have a better memory of him than I do. Why don’t you go find him?”
Her jaw dropped indignantly, “He’s your father, Smart-Alec!”
“Really?” he asked, “ ‘Cause I sure don’t see him around. His parents should still have our address and phone number, and they don’t even send Christmas cards, anymore.”
Mireia sighed, “It’s just a shame, that’s all.”
“It’s just the way things are,” he told her, “Listen: I appreciate the thought, but I’m about two or three thousand miles from his family, and about five hundred miles from the nearest Asian American community. I don’t know why the hell we couldn’t have moved someplace like Atlanta or Miami, but I’m here, and this is what it is. One lone alien in a sea of white and black folk.”
“You’re not alone!” she protested, “And you’re not an alien!”
“Emotionally, no. But I’m still a goddamn freak.”
She stomped her foot, “You are not! Stop saying that!”
He shook his head and turned his attention back to the crawlway. “I’m not having this argument, right now.”
“You started it!”
Ignoring her, he adjusted the probe’s position one last time, leaned on it . . . and it promptly dropped from underneath him. He barely caught it before it sank deep enough to hit the eggs—or he hoped he had. The distraction was enough to break up the argument before Mireia could take it down a road that would really piss him off. He wasn’t ready to talk about his ex.
Her voice came out in an awestruck whisper, “I don’t believe it. How did she do that?”
Bernard was too busy frantically digging to make sure he hadn’t broken anything. Losing an egg that way wasn’t the worst thing that would happen, but it was important to try not to.
The leathery white eggs, the size of ping-pong balls, were still intact, and surprisingly shallow for the amount of trouble he’d had finding it. In the years he’d been doing this, he’d learned that even turtles, which relied almost solely—if not entirely—on pre-programmed instincts, could make mistakes. He heaved a sigh of relief and pulled few flags from his bag to mark the site. Then he pulled out a notebook, logged the date, time, and location of the nest, and stood.
“Maybe you’ll get lucky, ‘Rei,” he said, “and that’ll be the only one.”
She gave him a sour look. “That’s not funny.”
“That’s my job. If it was any shallower I’d have to relocate it.”
They finished the walk together, Mireia picking the occasional shark’s tooth out of the sand, somehow spotting them easily against worn bits of debris, other fossils, and dark-colored pieces of shells.
Bernard picked up garbage. He’d once seen a turtle that had suffocated on a plastic bag, and he’d seen his share of other animals killed by people’s trash—though thankfully most of the animals he found were dead from storms, or else ambiguous causes that he’d left up to the State Department of Natural Resources to diagnose.
That turtle, though . . . for an animal that was supposedly dim-witted, their eyes were bright and lively, and haunting when clouded by death. It had been a windy day, and he’d never forget the pungent smell of it: like rotten fish. Over three hundred pounds of it. He couldn’t begin to imagine the horror of grabbing something that looked like the turtle equivalent of a steak dinner, only to choke and die on something as terribly flimsy and seemingly possessed as a wet plastic bag conforming to the animal’s mouth and throat.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
After that, he’d concentrated his efforts to grab every piece of trash he could get his hands on, and sometimes went out of his way for it, even if people thought he was crazy. If he wasn’t feeling up to it, he just had to recall the memory of that sea turtle.
It wasn’t just for the animals, either. The ocean fed the local economy, both in food and tourism, and all of his favorite things to eat came from the water. Half of those things were full of mercury, thanks to mankind, so the least he could do was everything in his limited power to preserve what was left. And who wanted to swim with garbage?
As he walked, however, he had something else on his mind. Jesebelle—or Jez, as everyone called her—had emailed them both a few days ago, and they had yet to get an answer from Mireia.
“So, I know you wanted to meet Downtown tonight,” he began cautiously, “But have you considered meeting earlier?”
Mireia glanced up at him, “Oh, wow, I forgot to ask Jez about that. Why does she need us to go shopping with her brother?”
He adjusted the canvas bag on his shoulder, refusing to make eye contact. “You know how Rubie’s always rearranging his room, these days?”
Jez’s younger brother Ruben had become . . . rather strange, over the past few years, and no one was sure how they liked the change in him.
She cast him a suspicious glance, “Yeah. Whenever his pendulum or cards or whatever tells him to move things. What’s he up to, this time?”
“Well . . . he and Jez are hitting the Market and . . . I don’t know, buying a new print, or something. Aunt Jess doesn’t want to tag along to watch him do this, and there’s no way she’s gonna let him go by himself, so Jez has to go, and their parents are hoping we’ll join them. For safety reasons. We’re already planning to meet Jez . . . and it would also save Aunt Jess and Uncle Matt the trouble if we could drive Rubie home. I mean, you’ve saved all this money. Might as well make the weekend a little longer, right?”
“I suppose,” she mused, “Of course they want us to drive Rubie home. Figures. I’m assuming you want to go for lunch, Sparky?”
He couldn’t help but grin, “What else is new? We’re going Downtown. I intend to spend my weekend eating, and eating well.”
She rolled her eyes at the sky, her entire body rolling in emphasis to be sure he didn’t miss it, “You and food!”
“You and shopping!” he cried, “If I’m gonna spend my whole weekend watching you try on clothes that you’re not even going to buy, it’s only fair that I get to eat my fill!”
“That’s the whole fun of going! Anyway, I buy some things. And most of my savings is for college, and I plan my spending, unlike some people who spend it all on food and fantasy books that they don’t even have time to read.”
“You don’t wear everything you buy, and your purchases are more expensive! So no: I don’t plan on shopping with you all weekend, ‘Rei.”
Now he couldn’t stop thinking about all the spectacular seafood Downtown Charleston had to offer. Grilled shrimp, tender scallops, she crab soup, deviled crab, juicy steaks of Dolphin fish, spiced fillets of tilapia, stuffed flounder. . . . He had never denied it: he was sucker for good food, and the South Carolina Lowcountry had some of the best on Earth. If a restaurant served bad food, it didn’t stay open long enough to be remembered.
They eventually reached the end of The Point, at the estuary formed by the mouths of Big Bay Creek and the South Edisto River. All that was left was thick, reedy marsh. The Sea Island waterways were dominated by dense thickets of spartina grass. Needle-like rushes grew through mats of dead spartina wrack and slimy pluff mud formed from decayed spartina, resulting in the area’s murky depths. It was a nutrient-rich habitat of environmentally and economically critical wetland, but it was no place for turtles of any species to lay eggs, so he turned back.
The surf along the South Edisto Inlet, where the river met the Atlantic Ocean, was one of the calmest, clearest areas. The yellowish water was an excellent place to spot dolphins, which occasionally came much closer to shore than Bernard would have thought possible. He’d even seen mothers bring their babies. Today, he caught sight of the local pod farther in the distance, prowling the waters of the Saint Helena Sound; the only pod of Atlantic Bottlenose Dolphins that stayed year-round instead of migrating. They had famously developed their own unique method for fishing the creeks, herding schools of fish at low tide and hurling their catch—and themselves—out of the water to feast on the slick banks.
The estuary region was a place where life began, thrived, ended, and began again. It was so thick with the cycles of life that Bernard almost refused to swim here. Instead, he preferred to enjoy it with a paddle in hand, silently listening to its rhythms, or from right here on the shore.
Mireia wandered the water’s edge, poking around for shark’s teeth.
“I’ll tell you what,” she proposed, “You run with me, from here back to the nearest beach access, and I’ll let you pick lunch and dinner.”
She would make him work for his food. “. . . I’ll run. But I’m not running with you.”
That remark set her laughing hysterically, “Alright, fine! I’ll walk, very quickly, and you can . . . stumble along breathlessly—“
“Ha, ha, ha,” he told the ground, “She’s so funny. . . .”
Something odd caught his eye. Plastic again, but in an unexpected shape.
“People and their fucking garbage,” he muttered under his breath.
It was a seven-sided object, flat with rounded bevels, and a bit lighter than he’d anticipated. It looked like it could have been a game piece—one too valuable to have been casually discarded. Perhaps it had been lost by a vacationer; but then again, the waters of the coast began in the mountains, so it could have drifted or tumbled downstream from almost anywhere.
The sun beaming through its dark emerald surface had the peculiar effect of making it seem as though it were somehow deeper on the inside than the outside. It was covered in strange gold markings that he was sure he’d never seen before . . . and yet, they looked oddly familiar. Now that he got a good look at it, he wasn’t sure how he’d mistaken it for plastic, although he couldn’t imagine what else it might be. There was something tickling at the back of his mind—
“Check this out!”
He looked up curiously at Mireia’s exclamation, and pocketed the object.
She’d found a huge Mako shark’s tooth.
“How do you do that?” he asked as he leaned in, peering at all the tiny black and gray triangles in her palm. “Good God! How many do you have?”
She opened her other hand and started counting, “Um . . . twelve so far. You see this beach every day, dude. You should have plenty.”
“I’m here for other reasons,” he muttered jealously.
She smiled, “Well, that’s your problem. You’re basically done, now, so there’s nothing stopping you from—what is it?”
Something else had caught his attention, and he set a hand on her arm. “Let me go check this out.”
“See?” she called after him as he walked away, “It’s probably just a dead fish! You’re not going to find any shark teeth that way!”
He had actually found some very nice fossils that weren’t shark’s teeth. What he envied was her eagle-eyed ability to find the miniscule things without trying. Even as he looked back, she was picking something up.
He lived just up the road, and could come back to comb for teeth any time he liked. This felt more important.
A turkey vulture had pulled something up out of the ocean and was squabbling with several brazen gulls over it. They all flew off as Bernard got closer, the black-headed Laughing Gulls crying out in dismay as they jockeyed for aerial positions with the Ring-Bills.
It was a dead animal, around three feet long. Even partially buried by the surf, he thought he recognized its spindly form from countless pictures of fossilized skeletons, forever frozen in death’s final throes.
A bird, he told himself, A bird with no wings, and . . . a really long tail. A bird. Dinosaurs are extinct.
It looked like a dinosaur with waterlogged fur.
Mireia caught up with him. “What in the world is that?”
He prodded it with his t-probe. “Hell if I know.”
“It kinda looks like a dinosaur.”
“It has to be some kind of bird,” he said stoutly, “There’s no way. I’ve got encyclopedias at home. I’m not going to say what it looks like, because that isn’t possible. It’s a bird.”
“With a tail like that?”
He prodded it again. It was still limp. Rigor mortis hadn’t set in, yet, and it didn’t show any signs of bloat. He lifted the whiplash tail out of the sand and stared in awe at a batch of long, thin quills extending from the tip.
“What do you think it looks like?” she asked him.
“Maybe a new species of heron?”
Swallowing, he set his jaw anxiously as he cautiously lifted the thing from the wet sand.
“Careful, Sparky.”
He gave the limp body a gentle, meaningful shake, knocking away a few stubborn clumps of sand. “It’s dead, ‘Rei.”
Something in its chest thumped against his palm, and he nearly dropped it. Carefully cradling its scaly belly in one hand, he pressed an ear to its ribs. Slowly, faintly, he heard—and felt—a beat. Then another.
“Jesus, it’s alive!” he gasped.
Mireia elbowed him in the ribs. She tolerated many questionable things that came out of his mouth, but she drew the line at the name of Christ in vain.
“Yell at me later,” he protested, “ ‘Rei, it’s alive! But . . . but it’s not breathing.”
She raised a brow, “Not for much longer, then. . . . I guess we should go report it to the State. Weird animal and all that.”
“Yeah . . . I guess.” Something seemed wrong about reporting it.
“What?” she asked, “That’s your job, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. . . .”
She poked at its sandy backside. “Is that blood? It’s purple. Or blue, I guess.”
“Could be,” he said uncertainly. Deep in his gut, something felt horribly wrong.
The creature was about the size of a small cat, not including its tail or long, spindly hind legs. It had thin little arms instead of forelegs, and small hands with tiny little taloned fingers. It wasn’t a bird.
It’s a bird, goddammit.
The thing was so thin they could see its ribs. Its impossibly long, thin legs were held stiffly at odd angles, but they appeared to be built for sprinting—perhaps even hopping—across dry land, as opposed to wading through the tall marsh grass. Its body, covered in shades of rich bluish greens with markings ranging from yellow to beige, was distorted by a number of dark, swollen areas, a few open wounds where the birds had pecked at it, and a nasty gash across its left clavicle, just before its shoulder blade.
A bird. . . .
It was like nothing he had ever seen or felt before. It was covered in fine, overlapping, scale-like structures—stiff, bristly filaments, but relatively supple like some sort of rudimentary fur. They formed a protective coating over most of the creature. The little scales became more triangular and lizard-like as they descended its lower arms and legs and traveled over its face, before becoming pebbly, like a cross between a rattlesnake and a Gila Monster. As they trailed down its stomach and the underside of its tail, the pebbled scales became broader and more elongated over a series of peculiar ridges beneath its skin, and widened over a vertical pelvis. One with notable protrusions that, to his knowledge, no modern animal possessed. The filamentous structures coated the entirety of its long thin caudal vertebrae, with a small row of spines rising into the wicked-looking quills at the end.
It had a short neck and a scaly post-crocodilian head bearing a pointed snout full of small, sharp teeth. Neither could hardly be any good for fishing
There were no signs of broken or otherwise missing feathers.
It’s not a bird.
“ ‘Rei, I need you to go back to the car and get the stakes. You’re a lot faster than me.”
She gave a disappointed sigh, “I guess we’re not going to be hanging around, are we?”
“I need to report this.”
It was the right thing to do. The State needed to document the strange animal and investigate the possibility of others. He was already beginning to wish he’d left it where they’d found it, but this was part of his job.
“Fine. I’ll drive the car to the nearest access, so don’t go far, okay?”
He nodded, “Sure.”
A track runner in school, she bolted up the beach easily.
Bernard walked to a tidal pool near the access and washed some of the sand and grit off the creature. Then he wrapped it in a towel he’d brought for Mireia’s beach excursion and put it in his bag. It just barely fit. He walked back to the nest he’d marked, and sat by the dune.
A couple of people walked by, saw the tracks and his volunteer shirt, and stopped to ask him some questions about the sea turtles. Part of his job included public education, so he spent some time talking about the Loggerheads: they laid April through July, around one hundred forty eggs. The babies hatched at night, and followed the moon to the sea, where they rode the currents south to the Sargasso Sea near the Gulf. Their genders were determined by sand temperature. Hotter years produced more females, and cooler years more males. The mothers would return in twenty years, and could live to be over one hundred years old. They would always return to the same beaches they were born at, but the males never came back to shore.
As much as he disliked his own species on the whole, he never minded this part of the job. The people who asked questions were always politely curious, and showed a genuine interest in the turtles’ well-being. It was a reminder that there were still decent people in the world who were truly interested in making it a better place.
Eventually, they went on their way, and he pulled the animal back out of his bag. On nothing more than a gut feeling, he moved closer to the nest, behind the tall sea oats.
Its heart was still beating.
The turkey vulture had taken to circling high overhead, but the gulls had moved on, some roosting on a series of weathered pilings from an old dock, now scanning for an easier meal. A black vulture arced in, distinguishable by a shorter tail and narrower wings, dressed all in black with faintly lighter tips, on which it alternated wide loops with the other scavenger.
A v-shaped formation of pelicans made their morning southward journey, numbering between 70 and 80 birds, wings beating predictably in time from the first bird to the last. Some days he’d try to count the larger flocks as they soared past. His record was close to 160 birds.
Another flock appeared in the distance, but he was still trying to decide what to do with the creature in his lap that was neither a bird nor a dinosaur.
Lagosuchus lilloensis had been extinct for more than 230 million years. This was a living fossil, to be sure. An archosaur, maybe, related to one of the crocodilian species of the Late Triassic, but it couldn’t be what it looked like. That was impossible.
The hind legs told a different story: Lagosuchus meant “rabbit croc.” These, combined with the forearms, suggested a locomotion similar to a rabbit, or perhaps a squirrel. Built for escape from large predators. Then there was the matter of the series of ridges down its stomach. Gastralia bones, unless he was mistaken. It was a very primitive feature found in some dinosaurs, and still born by crocodilians and tuataras, but no other living creature that he knew of.
His heart beat faster. This was either an undescribed species or a living fossil.
At the same time, however, its presence gave him a sense of dread.
A sudden spasm from the creature startled him from his reverie. He moved it onto the towel, and leapt away from its tail as it spasmed again, thrashed, shook, and lay still. Its chest heaved, and it began making choking sounds.
A third round of spasms traveled up its neck, culminating in a violent expulsion of liquid from its gut, mostly water mixed with what looked like bile and its odd-colored blood. Bernard wished he had moved further from the nest, sure this kind of organic mess would attract predators.
The creature gasped, drawing a long, ragged breath, and lay panting hoarsely, occasionally hacking up more fluids, but its eyes remained closed, and it didn’t appear to make any voluntary movements.
When it seemed as though the creature might be done with the bulk of its mystifying self-evacuation—a feat that shouldn’t have been possible, any more than its continued heartbeat—Bernard gathered the soiled sand onto his towel and set it aside. He would wait for Mireia’s return before tossing the mess into the sea.
He checked his watch, just as she came running with an armload of wooden stakes.
She dropped them at his side, panting lightly, “Sorry that took so long! This guy was trying to find the grocery store, and I swear it took me ten minutes to convince him that there’s only one major road on the beach, and you can’t leave without passing the Pig.”
Bernard shook his head. Highway 174 was the only road on the island, from the bridge all the way to the causeway onto the beach, where it became Palmetto Boulevard. Though the road changed names at the end of the beach, it still looped around to meet itself. Even if the man had picked a smaller side road, he would eventually find the causeway at the end. The Piggly Wiggly was on the corner. Simple.
Until now, that was about as exciting as this town ever got, short of the typical small-town gossip that went on in places like this. Whatever tourists thought Edisto was, to locals it was small-town USA: who’s dating whom, whose dog was scaring off the deer, whether a new house or fence was an absolute eyesore, and which church the neighbor went to. And, of course, whether there was any way to manage tourist traffic in the summer months without ruining the natural scenery, critical ecosystem, and small-town landscape that made this place so special. Most small towns probably didn’t have that problem.
“Did you tell him to pick up a free map from the store?”
She laughed, “I did, actually. I just want to know how he picked out this tiny beach to visit, then rented a house, then drove all the way here, and then got to his house without looking at one in the first place! And he’s had since Monday to find the store! He tried to get me to give him advice on fishing and attractions and whether he should try boiled peanuts, so I told him I live in Charleston and to ask a cashier at the store. I didn’t tell him where I really live, of course. It’s a quiet place, and I’d like to keep it that—is that thing breathing? How?!”
He shrugged, “Your guess is as good as mine.”
Rising, he moved the creature aside and set about hammering in stakes and taping off the nesting site. Then he dumped the soiled sand into the ocean. A few minnows rode the waves in to investigate, then darted away as he shook out his towel, hoping he hadn’t just dumped a new disease.
I hope we don’t catch any strange diseases from this thing. That was another reason to call it in.
Mireia gathered up the creature, “Well, let’s get going, if we’re going to call the State, deal with this thing, and make it into town before lunch—and I need to change.”
“I still need to buy shrimp and stop at the gas station on the way home,” he said, reminding her of an earlier conversation, “Mom’s going to be pissed if I forget that shrimp, and I promised I’d rent her some movies for the weekend. Let’s go get this over with. I’ll just call the State department when I get home and tell them to come get this thing from the house.”
They carried the creature back to the car and laid it on the crimson rear bench seat, on top of the ruined towel. As Mireia started the old ‘83 Escort wagon’s engine, Bernard thought he heard a sound coming from the back seat, but when he looked back, the thing was still unconscious and immobile.
The sun rises above gentle low tide waves at The Point at Edisto Beach, SC. [https://taladayarts.files.wordpress.com/2020/05/57aaa-100_1546.jpg]