“You know… the Lord loves a lunatic.” 

Most times Mae was looking my way whenever she hollered this, slowly shaking her head over something stupid I’d done, said. Fact was, I never thought of myself as such, but it is true how I could understand her doing so. After all, Mae probably knew me better than I did. I think, more though, it was the family from which I sprang that lent a sort of lunatic fringe feeling to those who were unfortunate enough to meet me over the years, lucky enough to survive the onslaught.  

“How you know?” I asked her once. “You’re an atheist.” 

Some things you can’t help. Like being born. Others you got a choice to consider, like believing in the Lord. Or not. And I guess to my way of thinking, the one’s related to the other, especially if you take into account the cadence of happenings in the life you lead, because then right soon you might see the cascade of interconnections quick as the crack of a bullwhip. Of course that don’t mean we all do. 

“Ain’t nobody throwing dirt on me yet, Clyde Thomas.” 

I started to say what the hell does that even mean, Mae, but then I remembered she’d been reading Vonnegut again, the old billy goat’s foxhole argument. As per normal, Mae was running two steps ahead of me laughing and dancing as she turned to look back, me hoping she didn’t run into a tree. Still you gotta admit a girl like Mae understood the truth of things I never would, couldn’t say how, though. At least she wouldn’t whenever I asked. Just sort of tilted that pretty blonde head of hers, smiled at me, turned and walked away while singing snatches of some little ditty I’d heard but couldn’t place. 

Sometimes I live in the country.  

Sometimes I live in the town;  

Sometimes I get a great notion  

To jump into the ocean…an drown. 

It looks metallic when you first sight it from a distance, like a great shiny aluminum bowl turned upside down. Moving closer it takes on an organic texture, a living thing, like that world-encompassing ocean on Solaris, alive, sentient, beneficent, yet without purpose, at least none any human being like me could ever suss.  

We walk the pounding surf as Mae searches for petrified shark teeth, while I consider the depth of the waves, how far out I’d have to swim before I lacked the strength to make it back to shore, how deep to dive, how if that first good deep breath of water might choke or if it might instead feel as though I finally made it home again. 

It is late November warm, we are alone. South I see high-rises sprouting out of the beach like someone planted rows of concrete shell seeds in the fallow sand then doused them with people now huddling behind glass and stone and aluminum waiting out the storm. To the north runs a long naked stretch of nothingness interspersed with orphaned homes, lights scattered about here and there, misthrown dice, like children playing closer to the water than seems safe but having no one who cares enough to call out, to warn them back. 

Thunderhead clouds far out over the sea are heavy with mountain, lightning shards pop beneath, breathlessly. Darkness rises early, it quakes up from the beach even as we walk. But wait. Up ahead of us, there, look. Look. Is that a body lying in the sand with the tide bubbling around it, threatening to pull the figure back into the deep?  

No, I think, chiding myself for silliness, my teeth grinding involuntarily till I wonder that they might break. How can that be? Mae has yet to notice, her attention to those beloved fossils that intense. I quicken my step my eyes fighting the soup of encroaching dusk. Mae has extracted a small flashlight from some secret pouch upon her body, is directing a point of grace at the sand as behind me she bends and searches, bends and searches. 

As I pad closer I see but a bundle of rags rolled by the waves into a cylindrical shape resembling a facedown body. Surely. Those are not arms, no, not hands twisting grotesquely and unnaturally claw-like and puffy at a starless graying sky. That myriad movement I discern is not sandflies swarming over decaying flesh but the tattered threads of raggedy cloth come loose, waving in the stiff night breeze.  

“Watch out!” I cry, jumping back, a hysterical thinking machine, unable to fathom this thing on the beach. “Watch out!” It seems such flimsy advice in the face the present peril. I feel I am hung up on saving Mae from the horror, so I ask myself: just what is it that’s going to happen if I go forward with this? Have I that choice? 

When I turn to where she stood, Mae is gone. Has she switched off her flashlight? Only no, it is not so dark I cannot witness the presence of another living human being. I jog back to where she was, searching for her, this way then that, finding only one set of footprints in the smooth wet sand the consistency of concrete just before it sets. 

A peculiarly large wave nearly dashes me off balance, rocking into that sack of cloth, rolling it farther up the beach before tugging it back, bringing it to rest at my feet. Sand hisses at the retreating water, an enraged goose mocking the sea. The pale dead purplish face stares up at me, black holes for eyes, cheeks eaten raw, stringy blonde hair streaming over naked skin.  

I reel forward, fall to my knees, gasping, unsure what I am seeing, putting my palms to my eyes and rubbing. Overhead, the moon breaks through a cleft in the clouds, its light revealing what I am looking at. Who. Lying dead and drowned. Mae. But how? She was just here, just here, just here. And now? Poof. She’s gone again. The ocean has reclaimed its prize. A voice wails from the darkness, from the sea, waking me. 

“The Lord loves a lunatic, you know.”