There’s a man I know who will sell you a sea monster for twenty dollars or less.. In his sea-crusted shop hang all manner of apparitions: winged bass and armored octopi, crabs with twenty claws and beady red eyes. He finds the critters washed up on the nearby beach, and in a musky room cuts them to pieces. He’s got drawers stuffed with skulls, cabinets crammed with claws, and shells hanging from rafters on fishing wire. The winged fish are his most popular. When a creature does not sell, if its needle teeth scare the children or its pugnacious appearance warrants disgust in every observer, the shop owner shoves it into a back closet, behind a door dressed with yellow caution tape. There the critter sits, flanked by other forsaken beasts, crouched and snarling forever in the shadows.

I visited him once, after sundown. We stood out back, the waves just white caps in the night. We stood, and watched the white caps spill onto the black sand shore, and were silent. All night I had felt a silent swell in my old friend, this man of the monsters, this shoreline Doctor Frankenstein. Fog crept around the cabin, hesitant against the flickering lamplight. I realized, in a sudden moment, that my friend was speaking to me. In the lapping of the waves, in the long, lonely sigh of the wind, his voice had seemed as part of nature, of the shore, as the sand, as the fog. He spoke of many things, his voice as old as the wind's voice, and his story was the story of the beach, of the horrors of the beach, of the endless sea on foggy nights, and of monsters. Monsters more terrifying than even his own jigsaw creations. And far more real.

"I was nine years old the night I saw them. My father and I were camping; a four-day weekend granted the perfect opportunity to stay in our favorite campgrounds up the coast. Throughout the trip, my father exhibited his usual silence. Another child might mistake a father’s censored speech for anger, but I had grown used to the treatment. My life was defined by silence. I had been born screaming, and neither my mother’s arms nor the doctor’s prescriptions could muffle my wails. Later examinations would reveal damage in both my ears; genetic, apparently, from my father’s father. For all my life I would live with two companions: a hearing aid lodged into my right ear, and a crystal ringing housed inside my head. My birth was a stark contrast from my brother’s. Three years earlier, he had come into the world silent. The doctors checked his breathing and gave him a solid slap on the back, but my brother did not cry. Eventually, he found his voice, but there was more missing. My brother could never connect with others. He spent most of his youth in fights at school or locked in his room at home. In the manner of most younger brothers, I worshipped him. I spent many afternoons sitting by his side, trying to emulate his brooding nature, or playing games around him in the hope that someday he would join me. It proved futile. On the night of my eighth birthday, by brother ran away. We found his bedroom window open, his carpet puddle from the rain blowing in, and in the silence of his room we knew he would not return.

I had learned many things from my brother in the short time we spent together. Never volunteer your name. Never back out of a fight. Always carry a weapon. The weekend my father and I went camping, I had a small Swiss Army knife tucked deep into my pants pocket. I spent most of the drive up the coast with my fingers wrapped around its smooth plastic casing. My father liked to keep his window down. When wind began to shriek through, I turned the dial of my hearing aid and muffled the world in silence. Beyond my father I could see the ocean, iron gray and infinite, and out my own window flashed the farmsteads that had sewn pastures into the quilted hills. It was a five our drive north, and in the silence my mind wandered and my fingers played over the knife in my pocket.

My father tapped me on the shoulder as we neared one of the small towns that peppered the coast. “Hungry?” he mouthed. We stopped at a Fish ‘N Chips restaurant, and I thumbed the dial of my hearing aid to tell my father I wanted a grilled cheese sandwich. Father ordered salmon. The waitress paused and granted us a queer look from the corner of her eye. “We’re not serving fish today.”

My father gave his usual grunt.

“Didn’t you hear?” The waitress fumbled for one of the newspapers piled on the neighboring table. “Some tanker crashed way up north. Spilled oil everywhere.” Spread across the front page was a panorama of a beach plagued with fish. It seemed a whole school of fish- a whole sea of fish- had wound up sprawled on the sand, coated in liquid bodybags of oil. “We had to throw out today’s whole catch!”

My father ordered a second grilled cheese. We ate to the grumbling of distant waves.

Our car rolled up to the campground with the sun smoldering low in the sky. Our chosen lot marked the clash of forest and beach. A short walk through the woods, past trees warped and stunted by the ocean winds, would bring you abruptly to the beach, all rising dunes and skeletal driftwood sinking slowly into the sand. There was the smell of ancient wood and brine, and at night the campfire would spark at the oceanic secrets hidden within the kindling. We set up our tent, the old green one from the back of the garage. As the sky eased to a bruised purple, strands of fog took hold of the forest. Soon our campground was enveloped in that uneasy white of spiderwebs.

In the tradition of camping, we woke to the eruption of birdsong at sunrise. My father and I spent the weekend hiking through the knotted forest or strolling along the beach. Time passed like a brief rain. I remember collapsing into my sleeping bag on our last night of camping, my legs nearly trembling from the four days of exertion. I sunk willingly into slumber.

It seemed within moments that I was awake. At the time I did not understand how I could be launched from sleep so quickly. I turned to my father, but found him asleep, his snores silent.

With trembling fingers I adjusted my hearing aid, and-

-there was a thrumming in the air, a subconscious buzz that warped and bent into a distant, alien melody. It was music made of waves and shells, or thrumming jellyfish tendrils, of the quiet hum of electric eels, of distant whales in foreign waters, of secret vents deep down below the water where pale mockery of life sing in sorrow. It was a song that undulated like a school of silver fish, at one moment breaking into unmanageable fragments, at the next crashing together, stronger, louder, echoing in every particle of matter, in every beat of the heart. It was a melody of the ocean, of the beach.

I found myself slipping through the tent dressed only in my hiking pants. The fog, silver and surreal, clung to my shoulders like a spectral cape. My feet gripped the dew-slicked roots and propelled me towards the beach. I climbed the dunes and stopped at the crest of the largest hill. The vast beach was laid bare before me. The haunting melody was stronger now, reverberating through the moon-chilled sand. In the pale light I saw, not fifty feet from where I crouched, the monsters.

They had the looks of creatures lost in the midst of evolution. Their hunchbacked forms wore a thousand scales in shades of lichen and gravestone mold. They limped forward on uneven limbs, gangly arms ending in webbed claws, feet stretched and tortured into crooked talons. Across their spiny backs hung pale limp bundles. The monsters crept from the edge of the forest and limped towards the ocean, towards the black snarling waves. With growing horror I realized the monsters held children heaped across their twisted shoulders, unconscious boys and girls my own age. The beasts’ throats suddenly swelled and sank, and the deep-sea melody grew louder. It seeped through my ears and flooded my mind. I felt my thoughts float away on those mad currents. My arms and legs turned to jelly, and as my eyelids threatened to shut I lay helpless upon the dune and witnessed the wretches limp into the frothy, lapping waves. They waded out until the sea swallowed their crooked legs, and as the waves yawned wide they sank down into the brackish depths. One by one the creatures submerged, dragging their poor, slumbering bundles, those children dreaming forever of a drowned tomorrow. My heart beat wild fearful rhythms, and I screamed- how I wished to scream, but pinned beneath the weight of the melody still echoing from the ocean and circling in the ghostly fog, I could not! With the last desperate strength of a child trapped in a nightmare I raised a leaded hand and clawed at my ear and-

-the crashing waves became voiceless enemy, my panicked gasps turned to whispers, and the hellish harmony blew off with the silent wind. No traces of the wretched march lingered on the beach, no evidence of the kidnapped children remained in the hungry waves. I stared out into the gentle oblivion of the night, out to where the ocean bled into the sky. And I lay, secure in my silence.

I finally stood, and brushed the sand from my belly. Out of the night a wet and mangled hand clamped onto my arm. As goosebumps broke out along my flesh I spun and felt my courage turn to water. One of the creatures towered behind me, all gangly limbs and silent horror. Instinct propelled my hand to my pocket, and instinct opened the knife, but pure loathing slid the blade across the monster’s chest. The claws bit deep into my arm as black blood spilled from the creature’s pale belly with a dizzying smell. The wretch opened its mouth in a scream I did not hear, and held its hand to its parted flesh- still pumping life upon the sands- and for a moonlit moment I stared into the monster’s face. Its face, caught between man and fish, all needle teeth and flapping gills and pale flesh like spoiled milk. And the beast stared back with eyes, so small, so blue, human eyes set into that horrific lump of a face!

I must have run, for next I found myself in the tent, clawing at my father’s shoulders, shouting, “Wake up! Wake up!” My father might have seen the wet sand clinging to my skin, or the blood beading on my arm, or just the raw fear swimming in my eyes, for he shot from bed and tore from the tent and stood with the fog twirling around where he had breached the night. I snuck from the tent and clung to his side. The night crept by.

As the sun rose through widow’s veils of fog, I slowly turned the dial of my hearing aid. I was greeted with the morning birds, and nothing more. I tugged at my father’s hand. “Let’s go home.”

My father eased his eyes from the forest to my face. He crouched and placed a hand on my trembling cheek. “Alright.”

The car’s engine growl echoed in the campsite. The forest shuddered by and the town appeared as shadows in the fog. Father stopped at a gas station, but a quick glance through the dew-smeared windows revealed nobody present. He grunted, and we drove to a second station, also empty. No attendants, no clerks, the doors locked, the lights dead. We left town, and as we did the curls of fog unraveled.

A thirty-minute drive provided us with a brand gas station teeming with morning life. My father made idle conversation with the clerk, and as the gasp pumped life into our car, my mind returned to the creature, and the black liquid that spilled from its gaping wound. And with a painful jerk my mind pieced together the smell of the creature and the smell of the station. “Oil!” my lips muttered. The monster had bled oil.

Many details of that night and the following days have drifted like midnight fog from my mind. But what I will always remember, what haunts my dreams on these nights with the fishbelly moon staring wide, are the creature’s eyes. Those eyes, blue and frightened, so much like my own. So much like my brother’s."