Resting Place for Prehistoric Mothers

The second time Liddie met Death, she was at the beach. Liddie saw Death on the sand. She saw that Death had a thousand fingers, each tied to a string, and each string with each wave pulled the bodies of a generation of crabs closer to the water. There could’ve been millions of crabs lying broken on the shore with the string of Death tied in knots around their hands. Liddie was twelve when she met Death a second time.

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It was a cold and foggy morning. The water receded away into the mist, sucked away down an unknown drain, and foam stuck to the waterline and quivered in the flitful play of plovers’ wings. The shore breathed and bubbled through thin wet fissures. New sandbanks rose out of the fissures like ribs out of skin, as if there were gargantuans buried under the ground.

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Liddie thought the beach looked like the underside of her arm. It stretched on for miles. It was smooth from the curve of the elbow to the wrist, and flat and pale, and the veins ran purple like stripes of oily water running through the sand. Liddie went out on her own into the fog. 

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She passed through the sleeping neighborhood and left the sidewalk for the dunes. She passed over them too and kicked the sand up, and stepped lightly over wood splinters and avoided broken beer bottles amongst the charcoal pits. When she reached the dark edge of the shore where the tar gathered like cancerous sores and the flies gathered in droves on the tops of her feet, she tied her shoelaces around her belt loop. 

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Liddie looked to the north side and started walking. The soles of her shoes bumped against her thigh. Her hair was down and floated about her head like jelly fish tangles. She was more or less alone, and walked in the white morning as the souls in limbo do: slowly, aimlessly, because there is little else in their bereaved minds to think to do. 

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Liddie had walked for a mile from her grandmother’s house before she’d reached the beach. She usually made this walk, every Saturday morning, in the fog, at low tide. She walked along the same shore. She brought a familiar glass mason jar in her pack to collect shells and rocks. She had $2.50 in change in a plastic bag to buy an icecream on the boardwalk around noon. And, her nose always ran at the beach. It was the cold. It was the salty, tangy, vinegar smell of matted feathers. The seagulls, always noisy, were especially that day. They poked around the black seaweed beds with round and feverish unblinking eyes.

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Liddie didn’t really care about seagulls. She was too slow to chase them, too busy with her head staring perpetually downwards. Her steps were awkwardly placed but careful. One after the other her frigid toes prodded at stones and flipped them over, they searched for sea glass and for shells. Liddie searched for sand dollars, those flat round shells with flower birthmarks. The live ones came in deep violet colors. They crawled like vagrants on the bottom of barren oceans, drifting without purpose. The waves would lay them here and the seagulls would sing songs for them. When they died, insides robbed of themselves, their bodies turned white and brittle. Liddie looked for the white ones.

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Liddie’s grandmother liked sand dollars. She would put them in the sun on the porch, and they would dry, and die if they were not already dead. White as chalk, dry as chalk, their white skin rubbed off into the wrinkles of her hand’s life line. She would shake the sand out of their flat bodies and then keep them on her windowsill in the kitchen, or in the bathroom by the mirror. 

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Liddie liked the smaller shells, the ones as small as dimes or nickles. She liked the smaller shells because they were harder to find, and somehow more precious. She reasoned, they must’ve died at a very young age to be so small. If she wasn’t careful out walking, they would crumble from between her fingers and be no different than grains of sand. She wondered how much of the beach was made of crushed bones and shells, and then she thought, if beaches were millions of years old, maybe all of the sand in all of the world was really just the broken bodies of shell creatures.

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Liddie liked to walk on this beach, even if she thought that the sand wasn’t sand. When the sun was high, the water reminded her of shattered glass. It was white hot to see and freezing to touch. She liked the vast emptiness, openness, of it. It was breathable. What she liked most about this beach were the cliffs on the north end. They were tall white cliffs with caves at their bottoms that marked the end of the beach. 

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When Liddie was young, very young, and she didn’t live at her grandmother’s house, she remembered having climbed the white cliffs. She could get ten feet up before slipping back down on her hands and knees. They stained her palms with the white chalk of centuries. She knew there were dinosaurs sleeping in the cliffside, tucked into the rock. She knew because her grandmother had given her a fossil of a clam from the same beach, and a piece of rock shaped much like a talon or a claw. But there was no walking further past those white monoliths. The dark water churned like octopus arms around the rocks and in the caves, strong and hungry. Even before she lived at her grandmother’s house, Liddie knew that Death lived in little corners of the world like that. 

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Liddie flicked a piece of seaweed with her toes, and traced it. But when she saw the cliffs ahead of her, she stopped. She hadn’t found any seaglass among the rocks yet, or any precious sand dollars to pilfer. Liddie saw a large mass of red on the sand. She approached it, and she got out her mason jar.

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