Seventeen today.
On an untouched stretch of the central coast, under a fog-blotted sky, seventeen girls take long, graceless strides across the beach and into the ocean. Bare feet sinking into sparkling sand, ankles roped with seaweed, hands instinctively reaching out again and again as they brace themselves with every stumble. The water froths, salivating at the sight of all that vulnerable sun-scorned flesh. The girls proudly offer flushed cheeks and heat rash-speckled shoulders for the tide to lick clean.
It was sixteen last week. Sixteen identical girls—they’re grown women, but locals and tourists alike fantasize innocence in those fawn limbs and salt water-brittle locks, anointing them “girls”—trudged their way through sand and seaweed and driftwood obstacles, eyes focused on the endless blue lapping at the horizon, and walked into the Pacific ocean with a purpose both alarming and admirable. They traversed centuries-smooth rocks and broken shells, the water swallowing their legs, their hips, their breasts, their stoic empty faces, until only their dark hair was left, coarse nests floating atop the waves.
That’s the worst part, how the hair keeps washing up. Clusters of loose hair, anchored by tough, slimy kelp where a scalp should be, return to the beach after each migration, nipping at my feet, chasing me with the tide. Tangled with jetsam, the detritus of doomed girls formed around plastic water bottles and candy wrappers and used syringes, creating a new creature.
And now there are seventeen girls’ worth of hair and tourist garbage. One more than last week. I’m standing here bleeding on the beach and it’s not a relief anymore. These girls with my dark hair and eyes and round cheeks keep coming and I can’t get them all out.
None of these girls are missing. There are no families waiting at home for a call from the police, no flyers with photos of round-faced women with their melancholic smiles plastered on the windows of every fish and chip place and tacky gift shop. There are no grave markers, no park benches dedicated to another “gone too soon.” The phenomenon of multiple identical girls voluntarily walking into the ocean is nothing more than a magical sight, a pop-up event inducing awe and wonder and the sense that you are special if you’re lucky enough to witness it. Same as the annual fireworks show on the beach or the increasing number of whale carcasses washing up, desiccated and yoked to plastic sheeting, bones capped with party cups and six pack rings. These girls have no names, no families, are never missed by anyone—because they never really existed.
Tourists turn up year-round, hoping to get video of this macabre parade. They gather on the beach, cell phones and professional camera equipment held aloft, but all they ever capture are rolling waves and footprints in the sand. The girls remain stoic, focused, even as the vultures hover close, pushing cameras into their faces, waving their arms and yelling for the girls’ attention. News crews come, but they too leave empty-handed, expressing their disdain, accusing us locals of cheap trickery for tourist dollars. They all scratch their heads, slap their palms against equipment that “must be malfunctioning,” compare girl-less photos, disappointed at what is just another postcard-perfect shot of a sunset against endless crystal blue. They speculate too many margaritas, or some sort of heat-induced collective delusion, before returning to the vacation rentals that line the boardwalk a half mile away. Crushed that they didn’t capture all those girls drowning themselves in the Pacific. Funny how not a single person has ever tried to save those vulnerable girls.
In the flurry of shutter snaps and pointing fingers, no one has ever noticed me on the beach, standing among the driftwood, blood running down my arms, either.
When I first cut myself open, I thought I’d be whisked off in an ambulance called by my neighbors. When the reporters appeared, I thought I might be a headline. But they never acknowledge me, not when there are girls marching to their demise. Even the locals, jaded to such a sight after all these years, have never bothered to snap a picture of me or any of the women who came before.
My mother was the one who called me back to this town. Like my grandmother and great-grandmother and all the women before them, she fled inland to the blush-brown mountains once she learned of the curse in our bloodline. That escape never lasts, though. Every woman in our lineage was forced to abandon every love found, every child made, every dream achieved, to return to San Clarice when it was her time. I guess I should consider myself lucky that I got to see a little bit of the world and the life I could’ve had before my mother’s voice jolted me back to this place.
There is no ancient and unknowable god in the water, waiting to devour the earth if we fail at some ritual sacrifice. We don’t seduce tourists with our long locks and lullabies, dragging them under the waves. There is no cycle beyond the moon’s pull of the tide. Our curse—the thing that tethers every woman in my family to this land—is the weight of a vague responsibility to protect this beach, though the origin was lost long ago, washed away by decades of blue-grey waves and clockwork sunrises. Someone has to sit in the little house on the bluff, surveying the cyan water as it swells against grey sky, a pristine patch of sea bookended by encroaching luxury condos and a revamped boardwalk bloated with theme restaurants and lost flip flops. Someone has to move and blend among the other locals who will never know my family is the only reason beer cans and plastic bags haven’t devoured this tiny section of coastline.
Like anything left to the water, the girls I release never entirely dissolve. Their hair collects an armor of plastic cutlery and other debris to form the indestructible creatures that chase me back up the bluff to my front door. They arrive at all hours, sometimes right after the girls sink into the Pacific, sometimes in the middle of the night so I awaken to the odor of sulphur-edged seaweed, heavier and more accusing than the brine-kissed sage that has burrowed into my nostrils and pores since my first breath. Like wolf spiders, these hair creatures scurry along doorframes and windows, creeping in through the smallest cracks, encircling the couch, the kitchen counter, the chair where I sit facing the window, watching the swirling water as it prepares to cough up more consequences.
All that hair, deep brown laced with auburn and dirty gold when the sun hits just right. There’d been a man who admired those same colors in my own hair, but I left him a thousand miles north, same as my mother left my father before I was even born.
She never spoke of her duty, not even when she was called back by her own mother. As she packed her bags, I asked all the questions that had been crashing against the back of my teeth since I learned of our family’s curse, but all my mother would say was that she had to go—there was no choice, and this time I couldn’t come.
I wallowed in my memories of building sandcastles and hunting for silver dollars while the women in my family watched from the saltwater-stippled house, their bodies covered and their faces drawn. Even as an adult, I couldn’t understand why our visits were so rare when we lived so close to this paradise. My grandmother and I walked together along the water once every three years until I turned fifteen, her sun-vulnerable limbs draped in black crepe like a Victorian widow. She refused swimsuits and dips in the ocean, encouraging my mother and me to enjoy our youth, our unmarred bodies, the way the sun kissed us golden-brown. When I asked her if my mother would be called back here—if I would too one day—all she said was, “You can’t break the cycle” before her words became thick and twisted in her mouth. I watched, stunned, as the Pacific raced long arms to us, its waves battering my grandmother’s body, her face, stifling her. The ocean lapped up her tears as fast as they came. When she was finally dry, seaweed, leech-green and studded with condom wrappers, poured from her mouth.
My mother never returned to the mountains after my grandmother’s death. Her calls and letters became more infrequent as the weeks turned to months then years. She stopped writing and I moved north. I learned to bake bread and pull espresso. I didn’t think about the seaweed or the little house on the bluff or how warm the sand felt between my toes. There were men, and birthdays, and Mothers Days where I avoided flower shops and drugstore card aisles. I eased into the shallow contentment of not thinking about her. Like every woman before me, I became a motherless daughter.
I didn’t consider a reunion with my mother, not one that would feel more like a wake. Not until that inexplicable urge struck, that same pull that distracted my mother just before her call came. That nagging feeling like I’d forgotten something, neglected some ineffable task, interrupted days in the cafe and nights out. Men told me I smelled of salt-bloated breezes and summer-sweetened cypress, and I found myself dashing out of strange beds before I could gather my clothes.
When the call finally came, it was my mother’s voice, far away, her words fat and wet and loose on her tongue. I listened, but didn’t speak. I was afraid of my own mouth, afraid that my words would come out as seaweed.
My mother was dead when I arrived in San Clarice. A couple from Albuquerque found her face-down on that little stretch of beach a half-mile from the boardwalk, her bare arms outstretched like a snow angel carved in blood-soaked sand. They said they’d been hoping to see the girls drowning themselves in the Pacific, but back then there had only been a handful each year—not the phenomenon it is today.
When I went to claim my mother’s body, the coroner handed me a condensation-fogged plastic bag containing her black crepe dress. The mortician returned her to me as a box of ashes the same color as the sand.
I gave her remains to the sea then cut myself open for the first time.
I thought I was so clever. None of the women in my family had chosen to be here, accepting a responsibility no one could articulate without their mouths filling with seaweed, their words smothered by ceaseless trash. I understood that nagging weight, how there is no use trying to resist the tide that pulled me back to this stretch of sand and hungry waves that made a home in my bloodline generations ago. The minute my plane touched down, sage coated my tongue and sea air gritted between my teeth. The mountains my mother had fled to and the city I’d found up north fell away like dead skin before I even made it to the family home on the bluff. I sat in that chair by the window, resenting the elephant seals that postured for attention, the pulverized oyster shells that made the sand sparkle under the sun’s golden arms. I cursed my mother’s name, her acceptance, her mouth full of seaweed and secrets. Why keep birthing daughters into this same fate? Why not try to end it? San Clarice is in my blood, so why not bleed until that bloodline is gone?
So, standing alone on this perfect stretch of beach, facing the ocean, I took a kitchen knife to my arm. My teeth clenched so tight I thought I might bite through my tongue, before I found a path between veins and sunk that blade in, slicing in jagged bursts from wrist to elbow. It hurt more than anything I’d ever experienced, the sting of salt mist on an open wound that burned and throbbed and reared towards the water as if it was its own animal, a live and galloping birth. Every stitch of clothing I wore soaked red, but the sand remained silvery, unblemished.
I understood then why my ancestors hadn’t done this. Until the first girl appeared.
My vision swirled. Woozy with pain and blood loss, I struggled to focus on the girl standing in front of me. My height, my shoulder-length dark hair, same sloped shoulders and wide hips as all the women in my family. She walked towards the ocean with such purpose that it didn’t even occur to me to call out as she stumbled her way into the water. I didn’t move, didn’t say a word, as she soldiered on, offering herself to the hungry Pacific until all that remained was a jellyfish of auburn-kissed brown hair undulating atop the water.
I didn’t tell anyone about the girl or what I’d done. I went back up to the house and dressed my wound. I put on a long-sleeved black crepe blouse I found in the closet and exhaled sulphur and brine into my palm. Out the window, the waves sputtered loud and angry as they licked long swaths of the coast, spitting back broken shells, tiny crab carcasses, the occasional lost fishing line. The girl’s hair—all that was left of her—rode every swell, a self-made nest gathering more tourist garbage from up the coast. The ocean was loud, but this new creature was nothing more than a whisper as it made its way up the bluff and back to me.
Nineteen today.
I stand on a barnacle-crusted log and slice both battled-scarred, no longer sun-vulnerable arms open and watch nineteen girls pour out of me like so much blood.
You can’t break the cycle. My grandmother’s warning weighs heavy in my mind every time I do this, but I still feel lightened by dumb hope as I take the blade to my flesh. Garbage and commercial sprawl crowd in, hovering like hungry diners waiting for a table, but this little length of coastline remains as clean and lovely as I remember from my childhood. Sand crabs traverse tide pools and bleached-bone driftwood, not the ever-expanding peninsula of trash abutting the shore a half-mile north. Seagulls alert each other to plump starfish and sandpiper eggs, not french fries and cigarette butts like on the boardwalk. Here, the waves bring back iridescent abalone shells, not whales corseted in derelict fishing nets, gasping on the sand for the relief of death.
Yes, it’s selfish that I don’t want to do this anymore, that I’m trying to break this cycle. I accepted the call, let that line in my blood draw me back, but a year has been enough to break me. This morning it’s nineteen girls; next week it will be twenty.
I watch them make their way to the water, and feel a new compulsion to fall in line with them. Let the water swallow me hips to crown. Let the waves carry back my brine-chewed bones. Let all those nests of hair gather pieces of me as their armor, indestructible filters skating along the bluff and sweeping clean the sand.
But I have no daughters, so no matter what, the cycle ends with me.
Back at the house, I bandage my new wounds and drape my arms in more black crepe. My body is a map of scars, a jagged topography, the valleys between growing too narrow for even a blade. The women before me were dutiful and kept their bodies as pristine as our beach. Perhaps my grandmother and my mother knew they were bleeding out their ancestry when they cut themselves open on the sand. Perhaps they knew I would succumb to the same futility. My mother left behind all those long sleeves and kitchen knives, either trusting me with this duty or knowing exactly what I would do.
When I crawl into bed, the hair creatures creep in, surrounding me on the floor below. Locks of long dark hair drift and swirl as if still in the water, auburn-studded tentacles splaying in all directions. Some grip bulbous lengths of kelp, pulsing and squeezing until the bulbs pop, sending a milky mist into the air. The scent of eucalyptus fills my room, weightless, as crisp and clean as the cool salt air outside. They are the products of my cycle, the filters that purify and preserve this one last stretch of San Clarice. This is what I protect.
The tourists with their selfish desires and the town council buoyed by myopic greed will never see, never know. Generations of women tried to warn the governing body, even as the seaweed threaded their teeth and the jetsam choked their tongues. We vomit up tampon wrappers and hypodermic needles same as the waves, and still, we are ignored.
All the locals and the tourists see now is the endless parade of identical girls I make every week. Girls drown and people squeal with a terror that sounds more like delight. They point and snap photos they’ll study later, brows knit in confusion and disappointment. That pristine strip of coastline—what should be paradise—is not the story they’ll bring home.
I’m waving my arms around, lightheaded, woozy from the pain. It’s an exhausting task, cutting through endless ribbons of scar tissue, haphazard layers of collagen resisting before releasing to a bone-deep throbbing that almost eclipses the sear and sting of flesh violently cleaved. I’m sweating and shaking, sounds I don’t recognize seeping out from between my teeth. A spectacle if I were anyone else. Blood splatters my face, but all those transfixed eyes and cameras are focused on the twenty girls staggering their way into the ocean.
Gasps of delight crowd the air as the girls sink into the Pacific. Any true terror, any sober moment of “somebody do something!” is smothered by oohs and ahhs and satisfied sighs as shutters click in harmony. Then the disappointed moans once everyone compares shots of sand, surf and sun with no girls in sight.
“Over here!” I shout, jumping up and down. I stumble on the slick rocks, tunnel-vision taking hold. “Look! Right here!”
They’re slow to turn, but they do. One by one, crossing the beach, they form a wide arc around me. Palms open, arms turned outward, I’m a stigmata-ed saint, beckoning with her last request. It’s mostly tourists, people who wandered from the boardwalk once word of the girls moved up the coast. But I recognize some locals: the woman from the post office the next town over, the man who owns the corner store where we overpay for day-old bread and nearly-expired milk. Mouths drawing impatient lines, they cross their arms and wait for me to speak or dance or entertain them. Something even more spectacular than twenty girls marching to their deaths in the Pacific.
“It ends here,” I announce. “I can’t do this anymore and there’s no one after me. There’s no one left. I can’t hold back—” I gesture north towards the boardwalk, the vacation condos, the peninsula of garbage bobbing against the shore. Dozens of eyes follow as I swing my arm toward the south, where the same sprawl and jetsam creep in. My blood splatters the rocks below. “This is all that’s left and my—” Something thick and bulbous catches in the back of my throat. I cough, sending a wave of cold frothy brine across my tongue. “You have to stop—”
I’m coughing uncontrollably now, wet and salty, but thinner than mucus. My tongue recoils from a flood of saltwater as seaweed crawls up my throat, filling my mouth with a mineral tang. Clenching my jaw, I’m crying ocean water, yet another thing I’m struggling to hold back. Then those bulbs surface, pressing against the roof of my mouth until my teeth are forced apart, my jaw popping as the bulbs pass one by one, anchored to their seaweed rope, over my lips and down the front of my shirt. My teeth catch on one and it bursts, spraying a milky mist as a cascade of bottle caps and shards of plastic clamshell packaging tumble to the sand below.
A murmur ripples through the crowd. I have their attention now, but there are no shocked faces, no brows furrowed with concern; this is just another party trick to the people gathered around me. A woman raises her phone to snap a photo. Then another, and another. Again, I try to speak, but it’s just more bottle caps and now the mealy copper—raw, animal, steaming with a heat so solid I could chew through it—of my torn gums. A man in an upside-down visor unwraps a neon-red popsicle and drops the plastic sheath onto the sand.
More seaweed, plastic, a flotilla of used condoms spill onto the sand. My mouth stays full with the same garbage that chokes the Pacific on either side of this stretch of San Clarice.
I can’t speak, so I point.
Behind the crowd, surfacing against the pull of the waves, hundreds of nests of hair crawl out of the water onto the beach. Threaded with auburn and dirty gold, I know they are mine, the girls I released. But there are new nests this time, ones I haven’t seen before: sunburnt sable like my mother’s hair, more grey than brown like my grandmother’s, white patched with translucent strands like my great-grandmother’s. They come together on the sand, an undulating army gathering plastic bottles and candy wrappers and the other endless garbage from the waters already ruined.
The crowd gasps, cameras flash. Under their hungry eyes, these new, impossible beings are yet another attraction to be shared for clicks and “like”s.
Video rolls, even as these ravenous hair creatures sweep over people’s feet, toppling them into the sand as they consume rubber flip flops and the bottle caps and other detritus that fell from my mouth.
Then the screaming, everyone screaming as so much exposed skin puckers, cracks, dries to leather as the creatures filter people’s blood into clean water for the ocean to reclaim. But the waves are louder, hungrily chewing the shoreline. Seagulls swirl above me, the Pacific endlessly slurps, the sand shifts as it thickens with my own blood. There should be a stampede as those left standing attempt escape, but all I feel is the warm sand absorbing me as I fall into it.
No more girls emerge from my wounds, but their remnants shuffle down from the house on the bluff. I can’t see them, but I hear these hair creatures even above the waves, washing lamb-soft over my face, my sticky arms, my legs speckled milk-white and green.
I sigh, finally relieved, breathing in sulphur and breathing out sage and eucalyptus with the creatures’ undulations. As they strip my body and clean my bones, I think about the generations of women who have given themselves to a shrinking San Clarice, all for this moment. For this summer-sweetened cypress carried by a tide so crystalline it brings back only polished stones, ancient shells, and thriving sea life.
What this place once was.
Originally published in The Off-Season: An Anthology of Coastal New Weird, edited by Marissa van Uden.
