Sous La Plage, Le Mort

The beach is a kind of gloomy graveyard for various flora and fauna. On the beach hundreds of thousands of horseshell carapaces come to rest, unburied, empty, rotting. Seaweed washes up on the shore, sagging jellyfish carcasses. There is hardly any room to step. And as we sit there, the gentle waves caressing the shore, I look down the beach and see this massive graveyard which seems to extend forever. How fascinating that we can ignore such a clash between the idyllic and death sitting silently, contentedly, reading our books and sunbathing.

I wanted to write a short story out here. I would ease a complicated plot into the setting that I am in. It would be easy, and if I ever ran out of things to say about the setting, I would just have to go on a walk to get some ideas. So, when I came here, I attempted to cast a writer’s eye about me. I explained in my head what I was seeing. I searched for words for the stillness of the land, for the death that lingers on the shore. On the first few days I noticed a theme: how one’s body is not one’s own when ravaged by flies and heat, unnerved by the animals that brush up against a leg or foot standing in the murky ocean. Rather than think of a murder mystery or an investigation of the nature of time (I told Afro that during a walk along the beach, Xha-xhi and I were catapulted back to 1915, we saw the houses disappear, but as soon as we turned around, we were back in the present time) I started thinking of her and Sihanoukville. I thought about writing about that, but it was nothing in particular that captured me. Finally, this morning I woke up with some lyrics in my head and thought I’d start with that. Before writing, it all seemed to envelop me, and as soon as I begun the task, it didn’t necessarily disappear, but rather revealed itself to be folly. When set to stone, it seemed to crumple.