By: Nic Anstett
1100 words
You are sitting on the third-floor balcony facing the beach when you see it breach the water. It rises upward with a snort of steam and sparks of flame, lifting its spiked reptilian head from the waves. It’s silhouetted in moonlight and bisected by the surface line. You know it’s too big to be there. You know because water that close to the coast never drops below fifty feet and this thing, breathing heavily in the ocean air and stretching its toothy jaw, must be all head and no body, but there it is.
You remember when you were young, and you came to this beach with your father. He had inherited a condo from his own father, who had bought it when beachfront property was cheap. You had stepped on a crab or maybe a glass bottle that had been discarded and shattered in collisions with other jetsam. Your foot had bled, and you had screamed. Your father tried to save the day by gripping it in his hands, constricting it like a snake and damming the blood from seeping out through your sole, but the damage was done. He spent most of the rest of the trip slowly building back your bravery, graduating you from walking on his feet like a puppet to a doggy paddle in the sandy ledges before the drop off. He sold the condo a year later.
A boy staying on the same street as the old place had drowned two days ago. He had been picked up by a big one and bounced against the sand. Your friend Kate, the one who went to a different high school than you but still called on birthdays and the deaths of grandparents, said she saw his heavy body being pulled from the water, head swaying back and forth and limbs dangling loose like a puppet.
Every year, someone died during this week. Every year, your mother insisted that it was absurd to expect anything but disaster from an entire state’s worth of newly graduated teens invading an infamous beachfront party town for five straight days. When your older sister had gone three years earlier, a girl on the crosswalk had been struck dead by a Subaru driven by a drunk boy. Your upperclassmen friends who had graduated the year before told you about the coked-out boy, or maybe it was a girl, that had fallen from a seventh-story balcony and onto the dunes. The person, boy or girl, lived, but it was counted as that year’s fatality. Part of you feels relieved now that the death for this year has already happened and it did not touch you or your friends.
Now, the thing in the water opens its mouth like it wants to yawn or bark out a scratchy growl, but there’s only silence. The heavy, sticking kind.
You feel a weight lift from Amy, whose head has been resting on your lap as she works off the eight shots of Svedka and the Jägerbomb the boys next door had dared her to swallow. Like you, Amy hadn’t drank before this week. Somehow, the two of you had avoided it all through high school. You had both missed the smuggled beers at graduation parties and the big rager where some guy’s parents had gone to jail and instead shared weekend nights populated with take-out noodles and subtitled Korean dramas. The two of you had promised each other that those days were over. This was, after all, supposed to be a week of infamous firsts. A five-day pilgrimage for sex, drugs, and minigolf.
Your first time was on Tuesday. It hadn’t gone how you had always hoped it would, a shared moment of naked intimacy with the now-unconscious girl resting her head on your lap who had seemingly given up on answering your texts or keeping your plans. Instead, it was with a boy you met at the dirty under twenty-one club on the boardwalk. You had felt lonely and abandoned when he grinded up behind you, but he smelled nice and while you had danced with boys like this before, it felt special and more dangerous when he grew hard against your ass. You walked back to his place together, talking about the restaurant with the good shrimp and the one with the rooster on the logo that had a suggestive name about cocks or peckers. His place was bigger than yours and had more beer and whiskey, but you didn’t care to drink and spent most of the night in a somersault of pain, sweat, and pleasure. He gave you his number, but you had already decided to forget him.
Amy’s first had been with your student council friend Luke. The two had called you to Luke’s hotel room afterwards for the sake of transparency. Amy didn’t like secrets. She knew that you and Luke had kissed at a party in junior year and still believed the lie you shared about a lingering crush. When they were done with their excuses, you looked up from the chipping polish on your toes and told them that it was okay. That school was over, and you were all adults now. Luke went home early the next day. He claimed that he had something to do with his dad, but you know, and Amy does too, that he had a nasty habit of running away. She told you that she should have known better and you hated him for it, but you hate him even more for tossing away what you can’t have. Amy held it together until hole nine of pirate golf on Thursday. To stop her tears, you gifted her a parade of ice cream, tacos, and pet hermit crabs and the boys next door gave her eight shots of Svedka and a Jägerbomb.
Now she rests on your lap, head to the side to spew vomit onto the floor and not back into her nose, missing the impossible thing that has awakened two hundred yards away. It moans a long, low hiccupping cry and you wonder, not with fear but with genuine curiosity, what it eats and who it is calling to. It slips beneath the waves, emanating a blue bioluminescence until it fades from view. You half expect to see a chewed-on humpback or a gutted cruise ship tossed ashore the following morning, but the beach is clear and immaculate until noon when the usual forest of umbrellas sprouts. All it leaves is its hazy memory and a reminder that you are, in fact, still very small.
Originally published in Lightspeed Magazine.
© 2023 Nic Anstett
Nic Anstett is a writer from Baltimore, MD who loves the bizarre, spectacular, and queer. She is a graduate from the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop, University of Oregon’s MFA program, and the Tin House Summer Workshop where she was a 2021 Scholar. You can find her published and forthcoming fiction in Witness Magazine, North American Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Passages North, and elsewhere. She is currently at work on a novel and a collection of short stories.