The Beach

by Matt Barrett

Andrew Bain

He remembers they took their father’s truck, so they had room for all their things. He remembers a curve on the highway, in either New York or Connecticut, and a high concrete wall hiding the sun and trees. He remembers getting there — sitting in the backseat, the belt across his chest. He remembers no one saying much. His father parking the truck and shutting his eyes, leaning the driver’s seat so far back Joanne had to sit in the middle. He remembers his father snoring, and his mother whispering, “It’s been a long day,” as if they hadn’t lived through it, too. He remembers stepping out of the truck and walking through the parking lot. And seeing the beach at the end of a ramp and footprints in the sand and children screaming at each other to play. He remembers sitting down beside Joanne. Not on the beach but at the edge of the parking lot. He remembers watching the ocean from there. In his mind, it is just a collage of yellow and blue and white. He remembers Joanne shouting, “Whale!” and his heart beating faster than he knew it could, before she added, “You must have missed him, he must have swam away.” He remembers looking for more of them — whales, dolphins, seals. Anything. He remembers how the smells were different, how the air was different, how it seemed like the world either started or ended here, how everything met at this one small place, the land converging with the sea.

He doesn’t remember the panic in his mother’s voice, when she shook him awake to pack, or the sound of men shouting a moment before. He doesn’t remember a woman at the Sunoco mouth, “My God,” when his father stepped out to pump gas or when he decided his father was someone to fear. He doesn’t remember his mother shushing Joanne to calm down or his father scrubbing blood and bone from the cracks in his hands at a rest stop in New Jersey. When he thinks about that day too hard, it feels more like a dream, a blur of colors and nothing more. But he still remembers they made it. He still feels it: the air and mist and his heart beating as he followed Joanne’s finger to a part of the world where even giants could disappear.

---

Matt Barrett holds an MFA in Fiction from UNC-Greensboro, and his stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Best Microfiction 2022, SmokeLong Quarterly, River Teeth, The Minnesota Review, Pithead Chapel, The Forge, Contrary, and Wigleaf, among others. He lives in Pennsylvania with his wife and their two sons and teaches creative writing at his undergraduate alma mater, Gettysburg College.