This week we asked Exeter’s budding writers to think about the theme of ‘memory’. Exepose Books loved Agnes’ descriptions of the naivety and simplicity of youth. This short story of nostalgia is the perfect remedy for those October rainy-day-blues and being bogged down by formative essays, bills, and compulsory reading. Enjoy…
Goldhaven Beach
On one of our numerous holidays in Wales, we visited one Goldhaven beach, which happened to be covered in dead jellyfish.
The sand was a dampened-eyelash brown, the sky an expanse of clouds unfurling like screwed up paper, and below the rocks where our parents lounged, finding silence behind their sunglasses, the countless jellyfish flecked the sand like dirty boiled sweets. Some gathered around the shallow pools where the sand met the rocks, as if ominously queuing for a postmortal baptism. My sister and I were getting along that day, and we laughed together as we paddled in the familiar, if dirty, crust of Wales – a safe distance from our oldest sibling, whom we had taken to taunting.
Maria stalked alone on the other side of the rocks. We were little more than an inconvenience in her world, but one sufficient to eventually provoke a response, and as we crept up to her for the final time, she likewise veered our way. Maria walked like she was trying to unscrew a stubborn jar, the fresh fat on her hips tautening her jeans to sugar paper.
When she was about a yard away, she crouched down to inspect the jellyfish at her feet, and we leaned in, delightedly horrified that she would dare touch it. Then Maria deftly gripped the sides of the corpse, and abruptly launched it in our direction. We squealed and lurched backwards, despite the weakness of the toss; the heavy bulk merely toppled less than a foot from its original place. In this displacement however, the repulsive entrail-like tangle of tentacles became exposed; the complex biological instrumentation that enabled the creature’s mysterious life as an angel-like entity in a vast, alien world.
I didn’t think about that life, any more than I thought about how our trusted crests dragged up its remains. Or the lives of my parents, the neurotic novelties who flapped maps and threw our days together.
Nor did I wonder what we were doing on a jellyfish-covered beach in remote Wales. At least not until post-teens; post-jeans. At which point, submerged in my new, safe dark world, I wondered why they did it. Was it the terse fulfilment of small, synced dreams reciprocally reflected in their sunglasses? Or was it so that, when the waves eventually brought me in, I would have something to come back to.
By Agnes Pye.
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