A Day At The Beach, 2029

Story and Images by Zedeck Siew
13 October 2019

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At seven my phone chimed. It told me the API was below 200.
It wavered there all morning, then dipped under 160 at lunchtime.
So we decided to leave the house without our masks.

Something we haven’t done in months.
Today was glorious, a rare gift: a clear day.

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A good opportunity for reconnaissance.
Amir wanted to check out some condos down by the beach. Prime real estate, emptied out in the bad old days, left empty since.

Amir thought it wouldn’t take too much for us to fix up a unit or two: brick the holes, cement the walls, install water tanks and filters. Put turbines on the top floors, for power.

Between the sixteen of us, and enough under-350-API days.

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Amir and Geeta came to us at the start.
Then Han; then Grace; then Sara and her two sisters.
Aisyah with her kids and both sets of in-laws.

Aisyah and family came to us sobbing, their minivan smoking, covered in a grey ash that bleached its red paint and ate human skin. Aisyah’s husband had got out at a petrol kiosk, in Cheras, to fill their tank.

He died on the way, coughing up chips of charcoal-ed wood.

Nobody living has come to us from the city, since.

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It would’ve been nice to have more space.
The sixteen of us have been roughing it out four-to-a-bedroom, for years.

But it was clear there was no way Amir’s plan would work. The condos were already occupied.
A god that wanted no human people around.

Even with the day so clear the god made its displeasure felt.
Han was itchy-handed, and tried to pick it up -- but it was too heavy to lift off its step.

We were quick to leave, after that.

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We decided to picnic, further down the beach. Didn’t want to waste a clear day.

Aisyah and her kids went swimming. On the backshore, under a tree, I found Lakshmi.
She must’ve fallen asleep here when the API began to drop.

On bad days, we sometimes find the ground shaking -- footfalls of something giant, unseen.

Lakshmi, walking by. After her passing there are marks on the ground. Footprints.
Round like an elephant’s; rimmed with one-sen coins.

We like to think Lakshmi protects us. She has never yet harmed humans.
I placed a one-sen coin in her lotus flower.

An offering, in thanks.

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There was a tanker, sleeping just offshore. Our town was always a refinery town.

Grace and Sara walked along the sand. Grace was telling Sara that she’d met a truck driver at market, the other day. He was one of the drivers still working for the refinery.

“Not scared ah, I asked him, the highways so dangerous?” Grace said his truck was covered in ash:
its wind-deflector plates textured with corrosion; the bodies in its cage-trailer stripped of skin.

Grace couldn’t see his eyes, of course. He wore a mask. “Still need to eat,” he said.

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Besides truck drivers, the refinery employs no human people.
Being a truck driver is bad already: hauling bodies across blind miles.

Worse is what happens to those bodies, afterwards.
Technicians who worked there never talk about when the refinery retooled to process bodies.
They don’t work there anymore.

The refinery processes bodies, and produces fuel. That’s pumped into tankers.
They carry it across the blind sea. Places out there still need fuel, presumably.

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At the far end, where mangroves began, we heard Geeta yelp.

Her left calf was bleeding. A welling pucker. A plastic bag had bit her.
The bags were waking up, writhing on their mangrove branches.

A sign the API was rising, again. It was time to head home.