the mortis by Jonathan R. Miller Read Free Book Online Page A

over.  He jumps that way again and again, and the water that surrounds him looks viscous and black and stygian like something that would flow in the underworld, something requiring paid passage.  At its banks, the castaway ghost of a child taken in the middle of play, stripped abruptly from the living earth.  It’s as though someone forgot to place a toll coin on the tongue of the child’s vacated body before it was given over to the cold ground.
     
     
    The boy fashions his own game of Escape.  He charges the sea as it recedes and then he wheels around and tears off in the opposite dire ction as the next wave comes—dodging the water like it’s acid or maybe lava—back and forth, again and again.  During one of these yawing circuits he falls belly-first into the water and he quickly gets back up again and then scampers upshore with his mouth open, cackle-screaming, squealing like he’s gone mindless.  The brown strands of his hair are slicked down against his skull, the liquid runneling off of him.  Chin thrust forward, arms back.  His pitched voice.  The boy is young enough still that his body instinctively translates joy into sheer decibels, even at the end.  
     
     
    Park wants badly to g o to the child—to leave this hole in the earth and rush over to stand a useless vigil with this wraith of a boy.  Gather him in a towel.  See to it that he has a warm place to lie between them.  Shoulder to shoulder.  Ration the water three ways from now on.  Let the child’s last days be those where he is at least cared for. 
    Having the boy to look after would be good for the two of them—the boy would give them a reason to keep running.  A defensible purpose behind this constant, harried flight to the next hiding place underneath the ground, out of view.  People need something to live for other than the basic maintenance of their physical bodies, and people say it has to be something greater or bigger than yourself, but that isn ’t right.  It doesn’t have to be.  A simple distraction will often serve just fine.
     
     
    The boy is collecting seawater in his cupped hands.  He is climbing the beach and pitching the water into a fist-sized hole in the sand as though he ’s banking something of value.  Over and over.  His bowlegged strides and the sagging bloat of his diaper.  Back and forth.  Making dozens of these small transfers, each one equally as important as the previous.  An agenda of simple reallocation.  His feet are riddling the sand with prints from the waterline all the way up to the dry berm, and the hole is no closer to being full than it was when he started.
    After a time the boy has saved all he can save.  He stops running and stands in the surf with his legs spread at shoulder width.  His too-wide eyes and his constant, grimacing smile.  He bends at the knees and he goes down into a full squat, staring at the water as though searching for something important. 
    The boy reaches into the wash with one of his hands and starts dredging around.  Water up to the middle of his forearm.  In time he lifts out a single small white cowry pinched in between his fingers, dripping.  The smooth and lustrous pearl shell with its slit-like aperture.  The boy studies the shell like it’s the rarest of finds, and for a moment he looks like a normal boy again.  He holds it up to eye-level, appraising.  After a time he places the shell into his mouth as though it’s a pill and he swallows it whole, and then he reaches in again, finds another cowry shell, and repeats.
     
     
    Park closes his eyes against the boy ’s suffering.  This baby boy.  The obscenity of the fact that a boy is abandoned and sick and feeding on scavenge taken out of the wet sand.  His complete insensibility to his own coming apart, his slow winding down, and the coming apart and the slow winding down of the world around him.  It’s true what they say: most of the time you know so little that you don’t even