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Back Out of Water Save as PDF
Chapters (20)
  1. Table of Contents
  2. Introduction by Gemma Files
  3. Endoskeletal
  4. Making Monsters
  5. Dead Man’s Curve
  6. In Tongues
  7. The Eyes of Salton Sea
  8. UnderwaterThing
  9. Tall Grass, Shallow Water
  10. Intersect
  11. Grave Mother
  12. Thorn Tongue
  13. Through Gravel
  14. Still Life with Natalie
  15. Golden Avery
  16. Scavengers
  17. The Eye Liars
  18. Magnifying Glass
  19. Crosswind
  20. Renovation

The Eyes of Salton Sea

THE EYES OF SALTON SEA

We never expected anyone to come back. Tourists won’t eat fish that might have eaten other tourists, nor bathe on beaches where the sand is bone and the water dark. They don’t sip drinks on a shore that comes and goes, rises and falls in floods and droughts, and every time it leaves behind a fresh blanket of dead fish. But the scavengers came. First, birds—for the fish. Then, men—for the wrecks that poked out of the fishbone sand like grave markers.

From the presidential suite of the abandoned resort, our balcony was a crow’s nest where we watched for the treasure hunters and filmmakers who came in investors’ SUVs, towing rented boats. They brought their cameras and robots, their hired divers and diggers, and enough money for the few of us who had stayed behind to make a living. It was a new kind of tourist. Not rich, but wild. Dreamers, like Alden, all after gold and tragic stories. The Salton Sea had both.

We housed them on the first floor of the resort, and I’d cook the fish they didn’t think twice about—sometimes fish they’d bring in themselves, their grins big—addicted to finding things, if only dinner.

And they’d ask Alden questions—interview him with their wide cameras. He’d show them his gold and pearl crucifix. But he never spoke of the ship in the inlet.

It was the sort of secret we didn’t even tell each other. Because someday the water might clear again, or recede even further, and all that would be left is gold and pearls. A treasure beach. When the shore shifts again.

I didn’t like the big cameras or the questions or the way they stepped across the dry fish bones as if it was any other dirt beneath their feet. I encouraged the sunflowers and yucca claiming the old golf course, read the books left forgotten in the bedside drawers. Sewed the ballroom linens into new sundresses. I fed stale crumbs of ice cream cones to the swarms of birds who seemed to be the only ones who understood what it meant to belong here.

The treasure hunters asked Alden to guide them and he’d decline, on account of his feet—and they’d think he meant that it hurt, or that he wasn’t a strong hiker or swimmer. But I knew he was afraid that the curse would take another piece of him. Like it was waiting for the rest of him.

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