“What is it?” She whispered.
I took a step forward, hesitantly, to examine the thing. It was a large mass of something flesh-like, pallid and white.
“A jellyfish,” I muttered. “Or a fish, maybe. A large one.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” She stepped up to the thing and took a stick from the ground and poked it. It didn’t move. She made a face. “It’s probably not ‘n animal.”
“But look.” I pointed. There was fine hair on some patches of the thing’s outermost skin, or whatever it is, slicked back in an oily, greasy, thick substance. It was almost invisible on the thing’s milky body.
“Should we tell someone?” She asked, and dropped the stick on the sand. I nodded.
Sam went to the paper to ask them to cover it. A few reporters went out, and a few days later, the whole town knew. They called it an ‘unidentified animal carcass’. At first, people were skeptical. My mother told me it was likely the body of a beached whale, but I didn’t believe her. I kept asking her, but she never went to go see it. I always thought she was just stubborn and didn’t want to entertain the possibility that she was wrong. I know now that she was probably afraid of it.
One of those days, after an argument with my mother, I ran out of the door and down the cobble to Mrs. Jones’ house. She was my neighbor, an elderly woman, and at this point in time, she was sick. That day I sat outside with her, on her back porch, with a view of the sea. She told me the Thing was a deep-sea creature, some type of large animal that lived so deep down in the ocean that when it died and came to surface the pressure had blown it up like a party balloon. She told me the same thing happened to her ex-husband, twenty years before, because he was swimming too deep and was being stupid and came up for air too fast, and she told me never to go deep-sea diving or else I’d hear it from her and my mother. After I (rather uncomfortably) promise not to do something I had never intended to do, she pinched my ear and kissed my cheek and let me go.
I didn’t want to go back home, though, so I walked down to the beach. Sam was already there with a gaggle of three year olds who were jumping up and down on the Thing like it was a playground.
“Are you sure it’s safe to let them do that?”
She grinned at me. “Oh, what’s the harm?”
I shrugged and sat next to her on the sand. “What do you think it is?” I asked her.
“Honestly I couldn’t tell you. My nana says it’s a fishin’ tarp. All stuffed with seaweed or algae or somethin’. I dunno what a fishing tarp is, I’ve never heard of one of those. Fishing nets, sure…” she trailed off.
We watched in silence as the children with bright red hair and warm faces desecrated the corpse of whatever cold, dead thing lay on the sand. A surreal sight, to be sure.
By the time Sam and I were graduating (Class of ‘66), the Thing was old news. It had been there for five years, and hadn’t decomposed or anything. It hadn’t even smelled. Still perfectly intact, the jelly blob sat amongst the locals’ picnic baskets and colorful beach umbrellas. It was part of the landscape, and we’d all learned to live with it and accept it. No one had ever really tried to get rid of it. Mainly because it was so unmanageably large that even the mechanical shovels we did have couldn’t make it budge, and we knew that. But it wasn’t really harming anyone or doing anything, so we just left it.
As time went on, though, people became more anxious about it. At first it was slow, a child fearfully clinging to her mother upon seeing it every now and then, or a middle grader’s quip about it being like an alien. When I left for college that first year everyone was fine, maybe a little grossed out, but when I returned, there was a strange, hostile apprehension lingering in the air. When I got to the train station I called the one person I knew who might be able to tell me something about the weird atmosphere I felt, because it was disconcerting for the normally cozy seaside hometown I was used to.
When I met up with Sam at the local diner that day, she told me all about how people would go to the beach to try and rip it apart. The townsfolk wanted it gone. I was shocked. She told me people became outraged and threw things at it, hit it with mallets and baseball bats, even threw acid on it. But nothing seemed to affect it at all.
“Reverend Leeson wants to try and set it on fire,” she told me. “Says its presence is witchcraft.” She wouldn’t meet my eyes.
“Why?” I felt sick to my stomach.
“Annie and TJ,” she said. “They both got real sick, and, uh…” She took a breath. “There was a, um, a funeral last week. You missed it, but… it was nice. They were so young.” She clears her throat, clearly hesitant. “But, anyway, he, uh, thinks it’s ‘cause they were playin’ on it. Hittin’ it.”
A shiver goes down my spine. “But, Sam, we–”
“Yeah. I know. I’m sorta inclined to believe’m now. I mean… it was so soon, and…”
“No, Sam, I think something’s wrong here. You’re… you’re off.” When she finally looks up at me, I understand.
“Who else?” I ask.
She is quiet, then says: “My brother.”
We sat there, in that diner, silent. Eventually we went home and, rather than saying goodbye, I just solemnly nodded at her. Upon returning to my home I’d found that my mother was no different. She spat curses over the phone, talking with her friends about the horrid beast that just had got to go. She now also believed it was the devil. The whole night I laid awake with a feeling of deep, unexplainable dread, the kind that comes when you’re paralyzed in your sleep and something out of sight is looming just behind your shoulder, but you can’t quite crane your neck far enough back to see what it is, and part of you doesn’t want to. I don’t know where the fear came from, but it sure wasn’t irrational. I think maybe I knew something back then that I didn’t even know I knew.
What followed was months of brutal attack. Townsfolk, even the children, participated in spitting on the Thing, kicking it, beating it, pouring gasoline on it and setting it off, attempting to rip into its gargantuan flesh with kitchen scissors, garden shears, anything they could get their hands on. It was a horrific display of violence with no end in sight to justify it. But nothing they did hurt it. They couldn’t move it, they couldn’t tear into it, it was seemingly indestructible. And the peoples’ anger only grew.
Outburst after outburst and people started setting buildings on fire. Protesting the city council. The state. The state never acknowledged it, probably thought it was some environmentalist plea, so of course they ignored it– it was the 70s. I even seem to recall, although it’s hazy now, school being cancelled for a day so that we could stay inside while the Thing burned so long that the smoke from the wood and chemicals being tossed onto the fire made the air quality dangerous. The next day, of course, it was unscathed.
Then two months later, it was gone. Disappeared without a trace. One day, there was just nothing there but a glazy rim where the fire had melted the sand into glass around the giant beast. That was the only indication that there had ever been anything there at all. Some began to speculate that maybe it had been washed out by the tide. Maybe it was somewhere at sea. But it wasn’t on the beach anymore, and that is all we knew.
Sam left town after that.
Fifty years later and I’ve gotten old, and the Thing is now largely regarded as an old wives’ tale. The story had gotten warped so much that it was hard to discern whether anyone was telling the truth. Schoolteachers much younger than I, too young to remember, told the little kids it was a little mermaid who had washed ashore. And that we helped her get back to her kingdom, and that she blessed us so that the town would have good luck forever. And I’d think that’s sweet, only that the repercussions of the incident (at least in my opinion) are way worse than people realize, and it’s probably only hurting us to forget.
The beach has been roped off due to unquantified environmental contamination, unspecified cause, and the rest of the town refuses to acknowledge that the Thing had ever been there are all. And that every year since its disappearance we’ve had a drowning. The first year it was Mrs. McKinnon in her bathtub, the year after that it was Harvey Dean who drowned his older sister in the kitchen sink. And every single year thereafter. It only gets more tragic over time, year to year. Last year it was a whole group of them, teenage boys, who went down to the supposedly “safe” beach on the opposite side of the island looking for seashells and they haven’t been seen since. Everyone knows what happened to them, though.
I’m not one to speculate, so I’m not going to try to tell you what I think the Thing was. Or why the town seems to be cursed after its disappearance. That’s not my place and frankly, I don’t want to think about it more than I have to. All I know is I hate to think about what’s gonna happen when I die and there’s nobody left to remember it. How bad it’s gonna get before something happens. Either the entire town is wiped out, or… it just stops. We’re all praying for the latter, but who really knows. There’s only a few of us left who know the truth, and once we leave this place behind too, it’s really anyone’s guess, I suppose.