by Marie Manilla

It was surrounded by beachgoers, the maimed gull. An elderly couple beneath a beach umbrella eating KFC. Kids shoveling sand into buckets. Folks reading. Sleeping. Gazing out at Atlantic whitecaps. That had been my intent, but I couldn’t stop looking at the bird, one wing unnaturally bent, a splotch of red, hint of bone. It didn’t cry as folks raced by within inches, seemingly oblivious, as the surf crawled higher and higher. I imagined the empty beach after dark, water erasing our towel stamps, our footprints and moted fortresses. Overtaking the bird. I couldn’t bear that kind of end for the thing. Its inability to escape as the water inched up. Its manic eyes in the night.

So I went to my car’s trunk and emptied the cardboard box of emergency gear: jumper cables, orange traffic vest, can of fix-a-flat. On the way back I scooped up a stick of driftwood, because I’d learned a thing or two. I’d have to act quickly for the bird’s sake, and mine. I put the stick in its open beak, and it clamped down so sharply I felt the jolt in my hand. Pain will do that. Old wounds and new. Veiled and unveiled ones alike. I draped my beach towel over its head and body and hefted it into the box. No one said a word as I hauled it away. Likely relieved that it no longer intruded upon their sunny day.

I didn’t take it to my beach house to act as nursemaid. I really had learned a thing or two. I drove to a vet’s office and handed the box over. Offered to pay for euthanasia, their solution. They waved off my credit card. Said they did this all the time, the humane thing.

It was a different ocean he took me to, my first husband. The Gulf of Mexico where tar balls smudged the bottoms of our feet. Where we caught stone crabs using chicken necks as bait. Tossed French fries to hovering gulls. Bought giant jawbreakers from that store on The Strand. I didn’t know a thing or two yet. Like the absolute truth that I had no healing powers for unveiled things. Or that I should have approached him with a stick in my hand. Or that perhaps I never should have approached him at all.

Marie Manilla is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her nonfiction has appeared in Word Riot, Cossack Review, Gargoyle, and elsewhere. Her novel, The Patron Saint of Ugly, won the Weatherford Award. Shrapnel received the Fred Bonnie Award for Best First Novel. Stories in her collection, Still Life with Plums, first appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Prairie Schooner, Mississippi Review, and other journals.