A Tale of Winter and Samsara on Sullivan’s Island
Part I
T
It was ludicrous to the Anarchist Crab that the one and only thing it could rely on was the tide and its timing. On Sullivan’s Island by Station 26 this occurred every six hours – where the turning of the incoming or outgoing tide forced the Anarchist Crab to relocate approximately four to six feet up and down the beach.
‘Life’s a joke,’ foamed the Anarchist Crab with its crazy, unblinking chortle.
This formed the principal basis for why the Anarchist Crab was also an atheist. If a God or Gods existed there would be someone to blame for this absurd sideways excuse for a life. Given the miasma of toxic cynicism which surrounded the Anarchist Crab, labelling it a nihilist might sound more apt. But the Anarchist Crab could never relinquish or reconcile how shit the hand of life it got dealt.
Trapped in a perpetual repetition of sufferance is a popular viewpoint (at least on a Monday) – which is why so many of us arm ourselves with blame – because it’s light and easy to wield. In youth, it often accounts for a lot of anger and blue hair, black clothing and cosmetics, Doc Martins and overcoats.
However unchecked, blaming misfortune can quickly spiral out of control – blaming it on the stars, on lime disease, on gluten, on others, on family, on money (or lack of), and on the misdeeds of past lives.
The Anarchist Crab was adamant it got served the largest pile of stinking dukkha. To try and take this away from the Anarchist Crab was a personal affront. If the Anarchist Crab watched movies it would have strongly identified with Paul Newman’s Cool Hand Luke – because deep down it was afraid to believe. Faith is a scary business. And apart from the exceptionally benevolent and beautiful sanguine freaks out there, the majority of us operate on a system of rational fear – like being afraid of bears, sharks, lightening and happiness because when they enter our lives they can really fuck us up.
So, the Anarchist Crab rationalised, to acknowledge a celestial warden would serve only to legitimise the Known Universe’s personal vendetta against it – and that was too much to bear.
‘Hey-o,’ said the Bipolar Jellyfish which had washed ashore nearby.
Caught in the thraldom of excavating a new burrow in the fresh wet sand left by the outgoing tide, the Anarchist Crab failed to register the Bipolar Jellyfish’s presence.
The Bipolar Jellyfish watched the Anarchist Crab fly across the tidal belt, depositing armpits of sand and transporting crushed up shells from its old home further up the beach. Each time it passed, the Bipolar Jellyfish trumpeted a fresh salutation.
‘Hola… Hiyyyy… Whatsuuup… Heyyy…’
But the Anarchist Crab was still muttering the same spiteful screed under its mandibles and couldn’t hear the jellyfish over its internal rhetoric.
‘A donkey in Morocco — a dog in Korea — a kid in China… or Uzbekistan — they got nothing on me.’
Eventually the repetitiveness of the work slackened the Anarchist Crab’s mind into a lull of quiet. That’s when it suddenly heard a voice.
‘Excuse me!’
‘Huh-’
‘Over here.’
Because crabs have toothpicks for feet when they walk it often looks like they are treading cautiously as if on stilts or tippy-toes. So when they stop it’s easy to mistakenly think it’s due to some unnerving or uncertain thought. However, in this case we’d all be right.
‘God…
‘is that you?’
Frozen on a crest of loose sand, the Anarchist Crab pivoted in the direction of the voice – terror filed the harvested black honeycomb of its beady eyes.
‘Arggggggghhhh!’
The Anarchist Crab had never seen a jellyfish before. So its glistening apron of gelatinous flesh and tentacles was a certified freak show of nature. Of course, the Bipolar Jellyfish could also make the same claim the same about the Anarchist Crab, if it’d happen to think like the Anarchist Crab.
The situation was made more awkward by the fact crabs can’t scream. Their thick mandibles prevent it. So while the Anarchist Crab’s loud exclamation reverberated sharply inside its exoskeleton, the Bipolar Jellyfish was faced with the stolid affront of a spurred, burnt yellow crustacean staring silently back at it with its unblinking black eyes.
‘HI.’
‘Argh! You can talk… but how? You have no… face!’
‘That’s not very nice.’
‘What- in the name of Poseidon-’
‘Who.’
‘Wh-hat?’
‘Who – I was correcting you. Mamma Tree taught us that. “You are a who not a what.”’
‘Wh-hat?’
‘Who.’
Remy the sanderling overheard the peculiar conversation as it marched by and decided to interrupt. This was nothing new. Sanderlings have an arriviste’s penchant for exaggerations, condescension, peer pressure, flights of fancy, mob mentality and interruptions.
‘Ow, a good ol’ fashioned theological beach-off – where do I sign up?’
Although sanderlings posed no threat to beach crabs, a genetic disposition to hate birds cleanly extracted the Anarchist Crab’s instant dislike of Remy.
‘To be beached – oh the travesty of destiny.’ Remy lamented while looking down at the Bipolar Jellyfish.
‘You’re a fish then?’
‘Yup- well no-
‘Well yes…
‘I’m a Godfish.’
‘Shouldn’t you be in the ocean then with all the other fishes?’ asked the Anarchist Crab.
‘Nope.’
‘I can only imagine the existential quandary this sticky predicament has put you in my poor jellyfish.’
‘Hey, how did you know my name is Eli – have we met?’
Sending one eye to the water’s edge while keeping the other on the Bipolar Jellyfish, Remy whispered loudly across his outstretched wing to the Anarchist Crab, ‘I dunno about you dude, but this one’s more jumbled than a Bayou Jambalaya.’
‘You know that’s a woman crab,’ said the Bipolar Jellyfish.
It should be noted that while the Anarchist Crab’s immutable grudge against the Universe centred on how unfair its sod of a life was, what really got on its tits was the complete lack of respect for female crabs. Everyone just assumed all crabs were dudes.
‘You sure?’
Again, the Anarchist Crab projected an unnerving silence to the outside world as it screamed away its frustrations inside its shell.
‘Oh, like the soup.’
‘Try Laurie,’ the Anarchist Crab clicked.
A delicate cry from the pacing of sanderlings on the water’s edge beckoned Remy’s return.
‘Sorry, must fly chaps, ahem and lady – literally. Haha.’
Remy briskly strutted back to his squadron which lifted like flaky grey embers in the stiff onshore wind.
The sanderlings glided out over the breakwater, briefly, then yawed back to the shoreline and landed like an audience taking their seats.
‘Birds are such jerks,’ muttered the Anarchist Crab.
‘Yeah-’ said the Bipolar Jellyfish, ‘wait, what’s a bird?’
Part II
T
The Bipolar Jellyfish was describing how it must have dozed off in the current, got separated from its reunion and ended up here when Remy sauntered back to our crime scene.
‘Don’t blame yourself compadre – I dare say this was your fate.’
‘You believe in karma too?’
‘Karma, really? the Anarchist Crab snorted. ‘You dumb sonofabitch – if you weren’t flat on your back you’d know it.’
‘Skirt.’
‘Huh?’
‘Godfish don’t have backs. We have skirts – so there’s something you don’t know.’
‘I’m just trying to help,’ but as soon as Laurie said it she knew it was lie.
She was jealous – jealous that Eli was so goddamn chipper. Laurie couldn’t understand how Eli could be so positive and cheerful when it was completely fucked? And it’s envy’s fancy to crush the things we most admire, or refuse to understand.
‘Well, with cold winds coming down from the north, and warm currents up from the south it is the beaching season,’ Remy reported to appease the situation. ‘So nothing to be ashamed of Eli.’
‘I’m not afraid – I just want to know how far it is to Mamacitias?’
‘Mama-’ Remy exclaimed before silencing himself with his own puff of incredulity. ‘That’s where you were heading?’
‘Duh, it’s Taco Tuesday.’
‘But how?’ shrilled Remy, trying to gain control of his voice again.
‘It’s Thursday.’ Laurie scoffed.
‘And it’s over the sand dunes two streets back,’ Remy added gesticulating with his wings.
‘Incredible – so I’m in the right place. How lucky am I?’
Laurie and Remy exchanged a worried look.
‘Lucky?’ Laurie spat. ‘Even for me-’
‘I know! It’s crazy how things work out.’
‘Crazy is right.’
‘I wonder if I’m still in time for happy hour?’
Courting futility with such unflappable optimism can infuriate the most equanimous creatures. It turns out recalcitrant beach crabs and pompous sanderlings are no different.
Remy was also reluctant to admit the scenario was playing into his greatest fear – expiring here where he was hatched, at Station 26, without seeing anything of the world. It brought back childhood memories of a beached whale.
The encounter haunted Remy, because the whale’s water thoughts still rolled like waves through his mind – the plaintive tones of a God giving up. What remained were dulcet echoes of something beautiful and sinful he could never get close enough to understand. What Remy didn’t realise is that how jellyfish sounded to whales.
‘I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but you know you’re not like a whale…
or even a regular fish for that matter?’
‘HA! Whales aren’t fish you dope – you dopey bird.’
‘That’s my point. You have tentacles.’
‘You’re a tentacle.’
The Anarchist Crab oozed a bubbling foam of hysteria.
‘Do you even know what a-
‘Nevermind-’
‘What the bird’s saying is you’re yesterday’s sushi. An Icelander who’s skipped dinner wouldn’t even stop.’
‘My legs have fallen asleep is all…
‘I’ll get up soon and be on my way.’
Water constitutes 95% of a jellyfish. And since water is the most conductive substance to transmit emotions, jellyfish are emotional cannonballs. That being said, it’s hard to know what a jellyfish is truly feeling – because they’re expressionless socks of briny water. They’re also masters of regeneration so they don’t show their scares readily. And without eyes or a face to betray what they’re feeling, silence is the only clue.
However, silence isn’t just a subtle and meek seamstress of hints and social prompts. It can also be obnoxiously loud and unbearable. And it was from Eli’s sudden downbeat silence that the sanderling and crab unequivocally knew they’d hurt the jellyfish’s feelings.
‘Seriously,’ Remy said out the side of its beak. ‘I know you’re a shecrab and are all tough outer shell bravado and all that – but a little compassion might suit you.’
The conciliatory lull gave no indication of restitution – just a shit tonne of inescapable discomfort and embarrassment.
‘I’m sorry Eli,’ Laurie eventually offered, ‘O-kay?’
Unfortunately, one thing that unifies the universe is when you know something is your fault and you fucked up, it ignites a fume of blame – with people going crazy and getting super angry, blaming everything and everyone except themselves. But it turns out reacting the opposite to how we’re feeling is bizarrely a pretty normal response. So, it was hard to disseminate from Laurie’s clicks how much of her apology was compunction over obligation.
‘I really hope I haven’t missed my reunion,’ Eli said finally, ‘and three dollar mojitos. I love mojitos-’
‘I don’t doubt it- I do NOT… doubt IT.’ Remy replied.
‘I order them with a sugar rim.’ the Bipolar Jellyfish added as it started sobbing quietly.
‘I am a bit fucked, aren’t I?’
‘You’re not fucked,’ Laurie announced all a bit too quickly.
‘And, you never know, you might get lucky. There’s enough daylight left for a bratty squabble of those flightless bipedals to come along and throw you back in the surf.’
‘When you are immortal, you do come to realise everything is unintentionally intentional,’ Eli explained from a watery well of deep exhaustion. ‘It’s … a special deal though-
‘There can’t be a you or me… only us.’
Death is common and made flippant in banter on Sullivan’s beaches, but the living and the dying never mix well – because reality can only take us so far. And the sombre reminder of what one will miss out on, and what the other has coming, is a convergence many of us find too difficult to bear. This is when a social sense of loyalty and common decency become cheap collateral for a quick escape.
Desperate to leave now that the jocular repartee had taken an irrevocable dark turn, Laurie cashed in hers without hesitation. She paid the price without a word or wave of goodbye – disappearing down her freshly dug den in a rampage of flying sand and legwork.
Remy took the Anarchist Crab’s less then eloquent retreat as its cue to also exit the macabre theatre of decomposition and death.
‘Well, you are brave! Both of you-’ Remy availed to upholster the mood. And just like a sanderling he quickly brought it back to himself.
‘Although personally, I would find it utterly unacceptable to see my end here, at Station 26. One day though you’ll see – I’ll hitch a ride on that Northerly. HA. Opps-’
‘I’m okay,’ Eli replied through a bubble of tears. ‘I’ll have to get going too soon.’
‘Keep your chin, ahem skirt up- down I mean…
‘I am truly sorry you’re so fucked,’ Remy added by way of apology as he sprinted back down the beach trying to outrun its own gaffe.
He returned to the shoreline eddies that were now splashed in a twilight banner of rose and violet. There he assembled with the pacing of sanderlings that were starting to huddle in a commune of safety for the night.
The sun seemed to abandon the Bipolar Jellyfish as quickly as its friends did. Not that Eli minded – the moontime brought amethyst relief.
The wind slackened as a crisp cobalt glow rose, which hardened on iridescent ripples of water and sand. This is why the locals tried their darndest to keep Sullivan’s-in-winter a pristine secret.
Now that it was night, the quiet that grew from the evening calm heightened Eli’s fears. It came from the waning tide and the now barely audible waterline that gracefully massaged the shore at low tide.
‘To come so far,’ Eli gurgled out loud in an unbalanced electrolytic fit of laughter.
Night brought little reprieve for sanderlings. Remy stepped forward to take the lead. The pacing of Sanderlings rotated leadership like a peloton. In the dark and in bad weather it enabled the pack to stay safe by perpetually moving back and forward in a soporific state.
They stuck to the water’s edge because evolution proved they were safest on this thin tumultuous meridian. So they never stopped zigzagging like zombie-maniacs up and down the beach – chasing the lip of the swell as it receded back into the ocean then racing away from the chest of the next wave about to crash on to land.
In fact on paper, Sanderlings had a lot to complain about. But they were a principled and spirited clan. Aside from their garrulous and articulate dexterity, what they were most proud of and known for was taking the High Road (always). They didn’t bemoan their own station and standing, or those who were more fortunate.
However, the problem with the High Road is after some time it gets hard to tell whether you’re still on it or not – especially when it’s so easy for unseen events and random encounters to steer you off it. Life has an uncanny ability to steer all of us astray.
As Remy fell into unison with the ebb and flow of the ocean’s nocturnal pulse, he thought more and more of events earlier that day. And the more he ruminated, the stronger his conviction grew that the shecrab was a right bitch.
Remy didn’t want to disrespect or discount her rational fear that everything on the beach wanted to kill her.
Who didn’t like crab meat?
Even during the short malting season when local swimmer crabs were at their most defenceless, there was no sporting sense of ethics to curb the Lowcountry’s rapacious appetite for crabs. In fact the opposite occurred – people went nuts for soft-shelled crabs. Mobs devoured the deep-fried baby morsels of savoury heaven. They bar-hopped, crunching and sucking through the soft-shelled crab until sold-out, then moved on to the next joint as if the aim was extinction by consumption.
But living down a hole mitigated all these perils, as long as one remained vigilant and was not cavalier, suicidal or vindictive.
‘I don’t know what her beef is but she’s got damage,’ Remy tweeted to himself.
A stiff wind rose to lift up the plumage of the sanderlings. It signalled a change of point leader. Remy shuddered, but with his time up he cycled out of position and circulated back to rejoin the rear of the group.
‘I’d be happy living all snug down a hole right about now,’ Remy burred as he tucked his pencilled bill deep into his wingpit.
Remy could already hear Laurie’s antagonist retort in his head.
‘You know what it’s like to spend your life down a hole because everything literally wants to eat you? A joke which proves God doesn’t exist – because otherwise she would have the decency to kill me a long time ago.’
Remy like every other beach dweller acknowledged outrage was the new hip in the digital wake of yoga and dietary restrictions – the new identity everyone was hiding behind. And he wanted none of it.
‘Fuck the seasons,’ Remy cursed, ‘I wish I could migrate.’
Remy was reluctant to blame his peculiar mood on the full glow of the moon. Sanderlings, like stints and sandpipers were an anodyne order and not accustomed to trading negative vibes. But the silly crab knew nothing of the mortal perils shorebirds faced – which attacked without warning from both above and below.
‘What does a crab even know about what’s it like to be a bird?’
Laurie was so caught up in what she deserved, she didn’t see what she had (which was criminal given her creepy periscopic peers). For an atheist, her misguided piety was embarrassing – because like so many others she confused empathy for martyrdom and martyrdom has a consumptive tendency to be self-serving and selfish.
She didn’t even appear to have capacity to comprehend or care about the jellyfish’s fragile state. The more Remy pondered Eli’s erratic mood and abrupt change of outlook, he found it peculiar, even for a beached jellyfish. As a subphylum they were always such a sanguine squad.
‘Must be bipolar,’ Remy concluded and at that moment his non-migratory instincts kicked in and he realised why the mango beach crab had got up his feathers.
Part III
P
The sound of Eli softly weeping outside the entrance to her burrow did not help.
She fidgeted like a recovering alcoholic, trying to drown out the Bipolar Jellyfish’s melancholic whimpering. She scratched sand away from the ceiling and with foamy spit and pressure from her hind legs reapplied it to the walls and floor. But Laurie’s vain efforts only chastened her anger at the world in general. She doubled her output. Unfortunately, the ferocity she directed into maintaining her underground dwelling transformed it into a vast cavern, and as the wet sand hardened it exhibited near perfect acoustics for capturing and amplifying Eli’s mournful demise. Laurie snapped.
‘Will you shut up?’
‘You shut up.’
‘I’m not saying anything.’
‘You just did.’
‘Crying is only going to dehydrate you quicker you know.’
‘What do you care?’
Laurie popped up at the tunnel’s portal.
‘I’m sorry – it just makes me so mad. Arrghhh!’
Laurie’s death stare oscillated from the Bipolar Jellyfish to the ocean as she kicked up sand in her bravura of contempt.
‘What makes you so mad?’ Eli asked.
‘How it’s all so out of control – the moon, the tide, these fucking bipedals and their fucking dogs.’
‘You’re just angry because you want to be outside the whole-’ a watery whistle trailed into silence. ‘You don’t see yourself as part of it all.’
‘And you do?’
Eli indicated to a nearby shell. Upturned and also freshly beached, the whorl on its nacreous belly glistened under the luminescent light.
‘That shell is life.’
‘That shell is dead – trust me, I’m the expert here.’
‘What made that may have been dead for millennia, but the Universe’s fingerprint remains.’
Laurie stared at the golden spiral. Exhausted, she felt her mind unfurl, cast adrift in a pearlescent sea while the squeaks and pips of the beachfront faded into static noise. Laurie might have been convinced of something, if not for her universal fear of knowledge. In her experience, any fleeting satisfaction derived from a fresh discovery was quickly hijacked by frustration and despair. This is why no one (with the exception of online dating profiles) really wants to be challenged – because answers beget more questions which beget more frustration and effort.
Laurie shook off the spell with vigour to retort Eli’s renewed optimism and wabi-sabi pontificating.
‘Well if you believe everything’s connecting then I guess you got to accept you got screwed.’
‘Fuck you. You’re just waiting around to eat me.’
‘Eat you?! Ewugh gross!!”
‘Watcha mean – gross? You’re gross you know – with all your hairy barbs and thorns-
and those pliers for teeth.’
Eli burst again into tears – the salty, uncontrollable kind that made Laurie skip and dance awkwardly between the personable gluey blob and the entrance to her den.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ Laurie demanded.
Stupidity scolded her krill pink when she reflected on what she just said. Grappling to usurp the former mood she panicked. ‘You’ve probably just got dead tentacles from sitting for so long.’
‘I’m a Godfish, not some ocean monster.’
‘That’s right! You’re immortal remember – nothing to fear.’
Crabs can’t cry but the mawkish jellyfish made the back of Laurie’s eyes sting so badly. And in the still pale luminescence Laurie couldn’t blame it (as she often did) on the sand or sunlight. Left with nowhere to go, the pain coursed down through her, to her gills where it stayed – a dull ache kneading a home of queasy, powerful regret.
‘I forgot,’ Eli quivered. ‘I am immortal aren’t I,’ he added with more conviction.
This is why crabs don’t do emotional scenarios – it makes them so defensive and squiggly and surly. They normally avoid them like the birds which is why Laurie had already made another deft exit.
‘Hey, you’re back down a hole.’
‘What? No, I’m not! I right here.’
‘No you’re not – I don’t care. I’m leaving soon. I’ve been here too long and my legs have gone to sleep.’
‘But, it’s impossible.’
‘You know that’s the trick?’
‘Trick to what?’
‘Immortality.’
‘What is?’
‘Staying still, or always moving.’
Laurie could feel anger and anxiety brewing again. She repeated Justin Timberlake’s Can’t Stop the Feeling in her head to drown out Eli’s crazed mutterings. Laurie imagined her shell calcified pristine white to match Justin’s flowing scarf – as they skipped in magic unity over the sand etching perfect Pythagorean spins of cosmic synergy:
‘I can’t stop the feeling,
So just dance, dance, dance.
I can’t stop the feeling,
So just dance, dance, dance, come on!’
In the light breeze Eli waivered. The Bipolar Jellyfish’s jolly demeanour careened into chronic wailing then pitchforked back to convivial whistling.
The Atlantic occasionally snarled, but Sullivan’s outerbanks quashed much of its bluster. Laurie could still make out Eli’s stream of semi-conscious commentary, but it too eventually abated like the incoming tide.
The impetuous swell and king tide guaranteed a midnight bounty, but Laurie’s eyes and gills couldn’t bear to go landside again. This wasn’t helped by Eli’s strange sudden outbursts which beset the idle silence – and made more menacing by the impression Eli was conversing with something more unstable than itself.
‘I know-
‘It’s okay…
‘there are heaps of different kind of fish-
‘fishes, fishes…
‘but I ain’t one. Hahaha’
When Laurie corked the entrance to her temporary home in the milky light of dawn, she sighed.
Sighs are like fingerprints and laughter. They’re all from the same blueprint, but pay close attention, and they expose our fierce uniqueness – each cathartic exhale offering its own distinct mix of relief, exhaustion and sorrow. Sot it was hard to know precisely what the Anarchist Beach Crab felt when she saw no sign of Eli in the morning.
Like people, just because a different animal group exists in cooperation of the universe, doesn’t mean they all want to interact. And if the finely silted sand on Sullies had a voice, it would have said never had such an encounter occurred between a mad crab, a maudlin jellyfish, and a bereft non-migratory bird.
The Northerly was back, which Laurie found convenient. Howling down from Nova Scotia, it was the off-season caretaker and had re-established itself early, wiping the beach clean like an Etch A Sketch.
Laurie greeted the barrage of sand pellets belting her eyeballs with sullen gladness – because Eli was gone, and so too any evidence or sign of where he went. Without an ending, the story goes on for everyone else to interpret and narrate – and it’s the stories we individually craft which give us meaning and keep us moving forward – even if it’s sideways (because you can still make progress by going sideways).
Remy scooted up the shoreline to intercept Laurie. Inevitability and sleep coated his voice.
‘Gone huh?’
‘Yup.’
Remy liked to image Eli pulling itself up the beach and over the dunes. Its limp mucous body worming along over the rough bitumen of Second Street to meet its reunion at Mamacitas just in time for last orders – to sink an extravagance of salty margaritas and regain an electrolytic equilibrium before sailing off to the calm waters of the Caribbean, protected by a sugary halo of xmas bliss.
Meanwhile, Laurie couldn’t help but envisage a much more realistic and macabre departure, which usually involved Eli’s flaccid dead sac of watery cells sucked back into the tidal wash – where Eli quickly disintegrated into flaky breakfast fodder for all the aquatic younglings and seaweed mites.
‘I’m here,’ yawned a motherly voice which resonated inside the craniums of the crab and sanderling.
Laurie pivoted, spotting a mammoth jellyfish caught in the whitewash before a small wave picked it up and dumped it on the shore. It spread out slowly over the hard sand like glue. A flowering eye with inlaid mottled coloured rings of kelp brown and red decorated the translucent sea monster.
‘Let me guess-’ Remy asked like his bill was smiling, ‘Mamacitas?’
The prehistoric jellyfish’s violet pupil fractured with scintillating surprise.
‘How did you know?’
‘Lucky guess,’ Laurie said then chuckled realising that luck never had anything to do with a “lucky guess”.
The thought petrified the Anarchist Crab (because despite the abysmal winter weather) she felt herself sinking back in love with the world. A daunting certainty awoke an old craving within her – like staring down a freshly baked pizza knowing you should limit yourself; even though you are sure as the sun sets then rises you will annihilate it, consequences and all.
