Marc walked across the beach, letting the sand slip between his curled toes. Small, shelled creatures crunched beneath him like shards of a messily-cracked hazelnut, the shuffle hidden through the purr of surface-licking waves. With the clouds, the light trying to tickle itself against the water’s complexion, it was difficult to tell where the sun was. He saw the waves tripping up on a white shape beyond the ocean’s oily curve. Marc quickened his steps towards the form.
A lace-work of shadows moved slowly across her body. Around her throat was a line the colour of ruptured fish eggs; as the waves scraped across her, the line wriggled, swelled, and faded, regrowing itself even thicker. He knelt down to ease his fingers on her neck, feeling his knees crack. These small sounds - the stretch and give of pants, his changing breath - seemed stark and amplified on the empty beach, even over the wind-pushed water. Marc cringed up with the imagined tap of his lowered hand, and the meeting of dry heat to cold wet. There was no pounding beat to match his fingers’ knock; the movement of her body into the waves couldn’t be confused with working lungs. Marc brushed aside one hair that prodded painfully into her open eye; the tanned strands seemed green against the darker sand. He exhaled slowly, lips in a pucker, and saw the translucent thought of a crab step around the straps of her dress. He wished her eyes weren’t so raw and swollen; he couldn’t be quite sure what their colour had been. The pale of her lips, displaced by the reddening slit on her throat, made his eyes readjust, elongating her face and distorting her chin. Marc dropped his shoes, sliding his feet into them despite the dirt and grit, and looked back across the beach.
With her body flopped over his collarbone, Marc could feel her arms thud nervously against each other and imagined her clinging to him; he shifted her weight to give them an even warmer placement, something like a hug. As a body she was light, but the drips of water slime against his thighs, and her blood smears like lipstick prints on his arms, added effort and precision to his walk along the beach. His teeth kept count of the distance with slight nips into his tongue, seeing how many it would take before he needed to move the bones lying languid across him. Underneath the parking lot was a steep, eroding push of land and cement, tied down with a holey and rattling set of steps. As her body’s broken jolts pressed against his stomach and the rusted railing, Marc cooed breathy reassurances onto the empty ears and blank cheeks. Marc’s car was the only break in the flat mist frosting the lot. Two small birds bounced and scuttled, trapped in the fog like smoke’s embers. They hopped aside as Marc neared his car; their wings flicked, showing off long bones beneath molting feathers. Pushing the handle first, Marc slid the door further with one knee. He lay her against the back row of seats, deciding before turning to strap her hips in and prop her neck against the window. He pushed his own seat back as he shut the door, allowing unnecessary space for the corpse’s stiff legs. With the car sealed, the air smelled deeply like an ocean, like a woman.
