Memory’s End
by Jordan Zachary
You sit down just above where the ocean can reach you, stretch your legs out and bury your toes deep past the hot, dry sand, and into the cool, wet layers underneath. The tide is rising, soon you will be crashed into by waves, but just in this moment, you are in the perfect spot.
You went with your family to this beach once, before. Squint, and in the waves, you can almost see your daughter playing at the sandbar, hurling her body above a small wave as your son calls out, “Over!”
If you look past their illusions playing in the surf, to the setting sun, you can pretend it is like any other beach day. Next to you, you imagine your wife sprawled on a towel, having started out trying to tan, but she has now fallen asleep, her face planted into a book, her arms half buried in sand. As you start to get lost in the way her hair is blowing in the breeze, long strawberry blonde curls healthy in a way you’d almost forgotten they had ever looked, you bring yourself back to this beach.
You are not surrounded by your family on a beach trip, you are alone. There is no one else on the beach, even though this used to be prime beach season. There are no umbrellas, no towels, no tanning spring-breakers, no families with children screaming. Just you, the sand, the waves.
You never realized before how loud you expected the beach to be, even when you had been at the beach at night. Never have you sat in the sand and not heard wailing gulls, traffic, drifting music from a nearby hotel lobby, or the click-click-click of a metal detector and the off-key hum of the metal detector’s operator.
Now, as you sit in the setting sun, the waves beginning to wash up past your feet, you miss the noise of what the beach once was. There are no seagulls crying, no cars whipping down the highway, no hotel lobby with inoffensive soft jazz music. You let the warm seawater wash up to your ankles and listen to just the sound of the waves and your heartbeat, the only sounds left.
Once, a lifetime ago, you longed for silence. Yelled at your dorm residents to keep it down after curfew, silenced the alarm in the morning to your wife’s dismay, invested in noise-cancelling headphones to block out the crying babies on airplanes. Now you can’t escape it. The silence is everywhere, clawing at your ears and burrowing in, reminding you of everyone you have lost. You wonder if this is why when there were prisons, people in solitary confinement would talk to themselves: just to hear something again.
You try to speak, break the silence, but the dust that seems to coat your throat holds your voice back. You have survived so much longer than the rest: months, maybe a year since the last death, and you have tried with everything in you to survive, not to let those you loved die in vain, but you are weak now. You let the water comfort you, its warm weight washing up past your thighs, holding your hips in a gentle embrace, the crash of the waves blessed noise in the inescapable silence.
As the tide holds you, you remember your morning routine, before. Waking up to the sun streaming through the windows, your wife already half-dressed and late for work. You, too, are late for work, and you would have been stressed then but, looking into the image of your memory, you are not stressed. A smile plays on your wife’s face, glowing with a golden sheen from the sun, the sounds of your kids scrambling to get ready echoing into your room.
Your daughter pops her head into the room to inform you that she has burned the toast, but nonetheless it is ready to be eaten. Laughing, you stretch out of bed, crossing to lift your daughter and spin her in your arms.
As you spin her, laughing, you see her transform in your arms to the end. No longer standing, you see yourself kneeling as you cradled her pockmarked body in your arms, unable to let go of the last member of your family. Three infection wardens had to pull you away after your allotted two minutes of grieving, lest you, too, become infected.
As you clung to her cold body, as the yellow hazmat-covered arms grabbed at your arms, torso, legs, before you decided to survive, you begged to become infected, to join your family. You have your wish now, as the infection eats at your organs and coats your arms with decay.
Forget the infection, forget the memory of her death. You go back to the morning you have remembered — or perhaps just created — and focus on how loud your daughter is, howling with laughter as you tickle her in your arms, her squirming out of your grasp and down to the kitchen table.
Your son is asleep at the table as your daughter plops down into her seat. In the past, you probably woke him up to finish his breakfast, but now you just look at his peaceful expression. His face is soft in a contented sleep, no stress lines, his cheeks pudgy with baby fat. You can almost picture him growing into broad shoulders and a severe jawline like your father, his features transforming him into the adult he never became.
The water is up to your chest now, hours passing you by as the sun creeps behind the horizon, but it is hard to feel the water swirling around you as your mind drifts deeper into the past. Take a long breath, you don’t have long yet until the sun has set. The air is thick, it burns as you inhale, but you can’t tell if it’s truly the air that is thick or your breath that is failing.
With a loud cough, your wife calls your attention back to her, dangling the car keys in front of you. “You left them on the dresser,” she says, and snatches them away as you try to take them from her. Laughing, you grab her around the waist, kissing her neck as your daughter makes loud gagging noises and your son groans at the public display of affection.
You experience the movement in slow motion, the keys floating in front of you, bobbing in the waves, the feeling of your wife’s neck warm against your lips, against your nose. Your wife’s laughter rushes loudly in your ears, as do your son’s sleepy protests against the noise.
You let the memory wash over you, its comforting warmth easing the aches that grief and sickness have burdened you with. Your eyes sting with tears and salt water. Consumed into waves of grief and joy and the past, you try to take another breath, but it is all water now, you are all water now.
As your throat burns and your body gasps and struggles without control, let your mind give way to peaceful submersion. Your memory is ebbing and flowing around you, you are ebbing and flowing around your memory. Open your eyes to see the sun disappear behind the horizon, your vision obscured by a haze of seawater, then darkness.
Your son tugs at your arm, free from the disease it seemed to be covered in just a second ago, pulling your attention back to him. “You are late,” he says.
Your family sits at the breakfast table, skin clear, eyes on you. You are so sorry, you say, and your wife puts her hand on your shoulder. You lean your head down on her hand, and take a deep breath in. Remember what home felt like, and close your eyes past the memory, past the saltwater, and let your breath out.
Copyright © 2023 by Jordan Zachary
