Sand Wastes
In late January the bodies started to come up. It was a bad El Niño, the worst we could remember. The streets turned into rivers, uprooting anything that couldn’t hold on—fenceposts, shrubs, orange Road Closed signs eddying miles from their posts. The government coordinated sand bag giveaways at the animal shelter and American Legion. My father and I heaved brown bags in the trunk, stacked them at our front and back doors and around the car and the sump pump. They helped, but water still came through. My mother set her alarm for every hour to kneel in the dark, changing towels at the doors. At first she worried about the wood floors buckling, about the walls seeping. But she eventually accepted that they, like so much around us, would just have to rot.
The rain came in waves, sometimes so heavy that midday would be black, others light enough that you could wade through the flooded streets with a hood up. It was on one of those days, the light ones, when I was walking to school, that I first saw a body.
It was so oddly disfigured that I wasn’t at first sure it was actually a human. Part mummified, part water logged, its yellowy flesh had peeled off in places and was grotesquely inflated in others. I got really freaked out, held my book bag to my chest and high tailed it to school. Everyone at school was talking about the bodies. There were others, washing down the streets, from no discernible source.
Our neighborhood isn’t so poor now, but during the gold rush it was a pretty shit place to live. We’re a few miles from the beach, and used to be all sand dunes. My elementary school had a framed map of the city from the 1800’s, and the entire western half labeled “sand wastes.” That’s where we live. As people died en masse from camp diseases, the dead weren’t taken far; they were buried, often many to a single grave, in the sand wastes.
Why they chose to reemerge during this winter I do not know. I have to imagine there were other, even worse El Niños before this one. But what do I know? The news called this a historic winter, and maybe it really was.
There was a lot of hysteria, as you can imagine. Dead bodies in the street, dredging up god knows what diseases. The government needs to do something, everyone said. But the government, insofar as it did anything, seemed preoccupied with the flooding itself, with power outages and collapsing homes and overflowing sewage systems, and with their own safety above ours.
Hindsight being twenty-twenty, the government really should have done something, though. Shortly after the bodies came up, other things started to come up too. I guess there’s some sort of symbiosis with the dead—not just the worms that crawl through your eyes, but other creatures no one could have guessed lay buried in the sand wastes. Some scientists speculated they were sea creatures, brought in on the warm tide of the storm. Bodies were gross, they were macabre and distressing, but they could be avoided. These fuckers were alive.
The sea snakes seemed to love the flooded streets. They’d float on muddy currents, flapping their gills in a way that seemed almost like laughter. And they liked the bodies, too. They sat on them like driftwood. They were social creatures, and you rarely saw one alone. They liked to rove around, little slimy gangs.
They also had an appetite for the corpses. They had several rows of sharp teeth that made easy work of soggy flesh and brittle bones.
They were scavengers, and only ate things that were dead. The bodies, and various small mammals that had drowned in the flooding. They appeared uninterested in us. Some parents kept kids home from school anyway, until we could figure out what was going on.
After the sea snakes came the water skeeters. Bright orange and the size of my father’s fist. They glided on the churning water, until they got close enough to fly into you and bite. They couldn’t usually get all the way through the plastic of our rain coats, but they left pockmarked holes where they tried. If they got your face or your hands their bites left circular, purple marks. No one died from them, though, except a toddler who had an anaphylactic reaction.
The toddler became a national news story—she’d been milky-cheeked with blonde curls and green eyes. The country couldn’t believe she was gone. People who’d never heard of El Niño before were now outraged. The president declared a state of emergency in our city. Soldiers appeared to carry children and the elderly from their flooded homes, to ferry them to higher ground.
But the last straw, as far my mother were concerned, was the algae. Ropey blue, it started growing from the sinews of the bodies. The sea snakes abandoned the corpses where the algae bloomed. Even the skeeters stayed clear. Content most of the time to flap with the currents, the algae would wait until you were near, then snake around your ankles, around your knees. People started drowning on their own blocks. Stanford and biotech companies took vegetation samples to their labs. They found ways to kill it, but the waters were anything but stagnant so they couldn’t introduce poisons. Fortunately, the plant was slow moving—though some might just say patient. We started carrying knives and scissors when we went out, to hack it off. School officially closed.
March came, and we all expected to go out like a lamb. “It usually gets better by March,” everyone said of El Niño. The sea snakes disappeared. The water skeeters decreased. But the bodies kept coming up, and on them the algae feasted.
We moved all our furniture to the second floor and ceded the first to flooding. My father and I came down once a day to check the rooms for algae. “No motherfuckers in our house,” he said.
The walls were stained with grimy brown horizontal lines, measuring the water as it grew.
April came and the rain didn’t stop. One by one, our neighbors left, to stay with relatives in the PNW or the Southwest. Young professionals returned to their home cities. They left many of their belongings to the algae. My mother started began praying, which wasn’t something we did.
June came and the rain finally lessened. They said the end was in sight, and called the whole thing an El Niño Episode. It only took a couple of months for the waters to go down, for the soldiers to withdraw and a politician to challenge the mayor’s incumbent run, railing against his mismanagement. Imagine if this had been the next Big One, he said, finger waving, as though what had just happened had been better than an earthquake.
In response, the mayor set up a team to dispose of the bodies. They wore bright reflective gear with the mayor’s name on the back, so we’d all know who sent them. They put the bodies in sealed, plastic bags, to be burned. With the rains gone, algae poison could be introduced, and the plant brittled and lost its grip on our homes, businesses, sidewalks, vehicles. Our house dried out and my parents started talking more worriedly about mold and insurance than sentient ocean life.
My father was proud that we’d stayed. We’d never had to be airlifted, we’d never run to friends or family outside the city. As residents and opportunists returned, my father would roll his shoulders back and say we didn’t spend one night outside our home the whole Episode. Not a single night. People called us brave.
School started up again. A lot of kids weren’t there. Most had moved, some had died. Counselors were on hand to help us through our emotions, and the standardized tests we’d gotten off track for. “Thank god, things are getting back to normal,” everyone said.
I found I didn’t want to say anything when people said that. I didn’t want to say anything much at all anymore. Because I hadn’t felt brave, and now I didn’t feel normal. Everyone thought the snakes were gone, the skeeters were gone, the algae was gone, the bodies were gone. But where had they gone, if not back into the sand wastes, where we still lived, telling ourselves on the basis of nothing but our own dull understanding of the world that we’d never see them again.