Corpse by the Shore: A Memory

It is hardly bloated, its skin the pale blue-yellow of the bruised, abused cloudless sky reflected in the water; it is face-down, its gender imperceptible, yet my guess is male. No, female. I don’t know. Its brown, gold and red-flecked hair leaks from the head like an oil spill, the green cotton clothing not of this age, or any age. Its fingers are long and thin, spread out palm-down, not floating upon the water but as if holding itself to the surface, the face peering in, and seeing what—the same sand and seaweed as the rest of us? It’s a nagging detail because it wouldn’t have stayed there as long as it did if it was witnessing the mundanity clearly visible through the glinting green saltwater.

The corpse was floating there for years. Sometimes I remember it as three years, sometimes five, thus likely the truth is somewhere in between. I’ve started setting the duration of its stay at four years for ease. I don’t retain the image from the first time I witnessed it, but I remember the sense of unease I’d felt approaching it. I think I waded into the sea and poked it with a stick. Definitely dead. Although I was only a child—was I eight? Nine?—the concept of death was unalien; I’d seen late relatives in their coffins, waxy in bored repose, ready to be locked away in decaying storage so we could remember them in less hollow states.

But this body was unlike those weightless entities. It didn’t really “float” at all; it was just there. I’ve had more people from my hometown messaging me of late, asking if I remembered the corpse by the shore. I knew I wasn’t the only one, although I don’t recall these folk speaking about it at the time. Nobody has a memory of it ever leaving, just the idea that it was there for around four years. There aren’t any news reports or articles on the corpse from that time period.

Sometimes I lie there at night and see it set in place in the water, the morning sun shining off its back, its stench drifting across the beach and dunes. It wasn’t a usual smell of death, more that of rotting vegetation, salty from its time in the sea. It brings me back to other childhood memories: Samuel holding my hand on the bench by the dusty cliffs, asking what it’d be like to fly, and me answering with a smile; musty, half-empty classrooms with the teacher snoring through basic algebra; my father falling ill and saddled with debt from funeral expenses. By now they all seem linked to that body in the water. There’s no sense that any of these memories happened before or after it appeared. There’s not much sense of time at all, anymore.

Some of my old friends have gone back there to find the beach. None of them can identify the specific cove—yet it was certainly a cove, for the image is clear in all of our memories. One of them sketched an impression of the scene and sent it to the group chat. We all confirmed it was the one. I haven’t been back there myself. I am scared that I wouldn’t find it either. I can barely find my way around anymore as it is. Streets seem confused, as if they each and every one would rather end in a cul-de-sac, or else split off infinitely, wishing to lead back on themselves again and again. I sense dust and sand creeping up through the cracks in the pavement, and the drains are pregnant with salt water.

My hair is getting longer; I can’t remember the last time I had a haircut. It would only grow back, anyway. My hands seem mysterious to me, belonging to a taller, ganglier person than I. Mirrors are no good; there’s nothing in them, nothing identifiable. I don’t sleep anymore. There’s only time for memories.

I remember now: Samuel and I did go down there once to see the body. It was night, and we’d both snuck out of our homes to liaise by the cliffside. We made our way down to the shore, and sure enough, there it was, the waves lapping around it. It was around twenty feet out, just past waist-height. Samuel joked, saying he was going to wake it up. I called him back, but he waded out. I kept calling his name, asking him to stop. He held a hand out to touch the rotten thing. The moon encompassed the scene, a great stunted silver oval. It seemed much larger back then. Now it’s just a fading sliver. I called his name.

I assume the corpse was once alive, unless it had always been there, dead from its inception to this world. If it lived before, what was it like? Did it have dreams and thoughts? How long did it live before it found itself staring face down in the brine? What brought it there? Is that what it wanted? And if so, what did it find there?

It is always late summer in my memories. Even now, the sun is a waning afterthought, and there’s a chill on the wind that invites colder climes, a new ice age to freeze us in time just like the body. I’ve not heard from most of my friends who journeyed back to our old seaside home. I guess they shuffled off the sandy pebbles and drifting seaweed for better thoughts, more complete memories. But I haven’t. I have neither forgotten nor returned. There is an aspect of me, deep within, drowned perhaps, that wishes it could complete the cycle and search for the forgotten cove. Is that a fantasy, a folly? I already have everything here in the city: the sand, the dust, the salt and the seaweed. Yet the thought persists.

It was one month ago that another of my friends asked me: Do you remember the corpse by the shore? The question surprised me. I asked what he meant, and he seemed hazy of thought, but continued to describe the hidden cove, the setting or rising sun, the oil-spill hair and ambiguous age and gender, the long fingers, and how it seemed set in place, as if embedded in the ocean’s skin. The green cotton clothing, too; all of the correct details. Yet my friend was one I had made since arriving in the city those years ago; he had never lived in or close to my hometown. Regardless, it was the same corpse.

Next was my boss. In a strange mood, he halted a team meeting as he blurted out whether anybody remembered the body in the sea. About half of the room did. I kept quiet, as I had with my friend. People were creeping up to steal my memories, and my dreams. It was not theirs to remember. I was the first one to remind my old friends of the body—thus the memory truly was mine, and not anybody else’s to appropriate. It was an invasion of what was mine, what I had earned through my own recall. I quit my job the next day.

A week later, the news reports started: Who else remembers the corpse by the shore? It seemed that everyone had a story to share. The details began changing. The clothing was red, not green; silk, not cotton. It was definitely female; it was definitely male. Everyone was claiming to grow up by the water, by the cove. Then it wasn’t just a cove: the body was in the river, the lake, the stream, face down and floating; not floating, set in place; no, hovering; whatever the case, the fingers were long and thin, the skin a pale blue-yellow like the recollected sky; all these stolen memories, a shade further from the truth.

In this time I tried to contact Samuel. I had loved him, I think, and we’d split when I left the town, but I don’t remember the details. One day he was there, then he wasn’t. I don’t have any set memories of our time together after that night by the shore when he had approached the body. None of the people I was still in contact with from the town had heard from him in years. He wasn’t on social media, but I avoided those places myself regardless, now more than ever from the spreading memes about the corpse by the shore. Ultimately I found no trace of him, yet I knew he held the key for me to prove that this was my memory. Nobody else knew a soul who had approached and perhaps even touched the body. I was a memory ahead of the crowd.

Before long it was all anybody could talk about. Arguments were constant about the surrounding details of clothing, age, gender, etc., only those other, prior-stated details remaining constant. I did not engage. Soon, Americans were talking about finding the corpse in the creek whilst fishing, Australians observing it not-floating off Mandalay Beach, Russians recalling it face down in the Volga, Chinese teens staring at it from the Nanjing Yangtze bridge, Namibians stating its appearance off Angra Point. The Ticuna people of the Amazon claimed the body was a part of their folklore for generations. Yet they were all wrong: the body was my memory, my childhood, my folklore.

It wasn’t long until the sand began collecting in cities and towns the world across. Soon every person on earth had their own iteration of the story, and the salt water rose up from the drains to flood the streets. Then there really were other bodies floating face down, but they were pale imitations: their fingers short and stubby, their clothing of mixed fibres and colours, their hair curt and their ages and genders clearly identifiable. Religious leaders were proclaiming the baptism story was a precursor to the corpse by the shore, and that the body lay upon the surface just as Jesus had walked. The streets seemed now more like cricks and tight streams, stones collecting on these new sandy shores.

Each day I notice more flecks of rusty red and glimmering gold in my chestnut hair. My bruised fingers extend further yet, absurd spiderleg limbs that spread out as if to touch every corner of the room. I wish to be felt again by Samuel, for him to reach out to me just as he had the corpse that patchwork night. If I could only go back and turn it over myself, and know the truth. Yet then I would stripping it of what could be its birthright, or its given choice to submerge its face and see what lay beyond the murky water and seaweed and sand.

All around us is the stench of rotting vegetation, thick and saline. Summer is fading to the tenebrous afterword. The last thing I can do is clear: to prove my memory correct, to one and all, I will journey back to my hometown. The cove, I know, will open for me; everything will open up, the world itself has been waiting for my presence; I am a memory, the first and last, and I will remember and be remembered. With time, others will follow; all will converge upon that twilit beach as Samuel and I meet in the water.

The air tears through with frozen talons; the water is a stretch of oil-spill hair; gangly limbs caress the surface, held in place by some half-remembered aspect of a thought; a fantasy of musty classrooms, discarded love, familiar waxen masques; sense-memory activated by hemorrhaged dreams and silent molested sky; something unfulfilled, staring through flotsam and jetsam towards a gaping abscess-abyss wherein the cycle becomes complete and begins again; enshrouded in brine between the recollected mundane and the grotesquely unknown, an incomplete and misplaced harbouring, a corpse by the shore, a forgotten memory.