The seawall whispers the voices of the drowned,
their words curling into the fog, sticky with salt and secrets.
From the mist, she emerges—
a girl in a striped bathing suit, 1905 etched into her eyes,
skin bloated like the Gulf beneath her feet.
“Remember when we thought machines would save us?”
she asks, each word peeling off her lips like rust.
Her laugh is brittle,
snagging on the wind like a torn kite string
before she crumbles into the concrete,
leaving only the smell of brine and iron.
Next, the banker waddles out of the surf,
belly gorged with ledgers, suit stitched with oil slicks.
His briefcase splits at the seams, spilling coins,
each one a politician’s grin smeared with tar.
“Capital’s a tide, boy. It swells, it eats,
but we forgot how to swim, didn’t we?”
His eyes gleam like wet sand,
his cough sprays gold teeth that clatter and roll—
but when I reach down, they’ve already turned to ash.
Farther down, half a century closer,
the maid sweeps sand from the seawall,
her broom scratching the concrete like nails on glass.
She is the ocean’s servant, apron stiff, arms bone-weary.
“The mess never ends, child. It never ends.”
The horizon yawns open behind her,
belching up televisions, fast-food wrappers,
oil drums bobbing in the swell
like bloated bodies refusing to sink.
I stumble, kick a child’s bucket,
and out spills a tangle of fingers, slick sea glass,
the shards still blood-warm.
The boy who dropped it stands nearby, face all mask,
eyes nothing but static,
like a TV tuned to an empty channel.
“They’re watching you right now,” he giggles,
voice full of nails.
“We used to be ghosts, but now we’re just content.”
He dissolves, pixel by pixel, into the fog.
My legs buckle beneath the weight of it all,
and I flee,
running—no, crawling—into the belly of The Hotel Galvez,
the hotel’s maw wide, swallowing me whole.
Inside, the lobby swims with flickering light,
and they’re all waiting:
the banker slick with oil, the maid sweeping ceaselessly,
the drowned girl wringing her hands into the floor.
They watch as the concierge, face pale as bone,
sharpens a scythe behind the desk.
The blade sings against the whetstone,
a hymn for the lost.
“Join us,” they murmur,
voices hollow as seashells held to dead ears,
a chorus of futures washed away.
The walls pulse, thick with the stench of oil,
the air clotted with the rot of history,
and the floor—God, the floor—
pulls at my shoes like quicksand,
like every step I’ve taken has been leading me here,
to the heart of forgetting.
I turn, but the doors have melted into mist,
and the horizon outside no longer exists—
just an endless, flickering reel of the past,
spinning and spilling across the Gulf,
where the oil-slick waves
carry the ghosts of what we never learned
to let die.
