Curious Stories

This story won first prize at Killer-Works.com “Beach Blanket Bloodbath” Contest in August 2008.  It’s summery!

Highsmith Beach

By Bill Breedlove

It was, Charles Magnus decided, an abomination.

It was vile, disgusting, and obscene.  He had been coming to Highsmith Beach for a long, long time, and—while he had certainly seen more than his fair share of disturbing and strange things over the years, this was just too much.

Charles shook his head as he liberally applied the sunscreen to his arms and bare shoulders.  With disbelieving eyes, Charles turned his gaze back to the boy.  The lad couldn’t have been more than 11 or 12, standing in his swimming trunks underneath a large beach umbrella while the two adults with him—his parents, presumably—BOTH talked into cell phones, completely oblivious of the monstrosity.

Fat.  The boy was fat.  Not plump, not chubby, not even, as the department stores of Charles’ youth had euphemistically termed it, “husky.”  He was fat.  Hugely so.  Grossly so.  His skin was an unhealthy, splotchy white.  His ample belly hung floppily over his shorts, gigantic chunks of flab dangled down on both sides of where his waist should’ve been, his arms and legs were dimpled and rolled with doughy flesh that quivered even when he was at rest, and his neck looked as if it had a small, inflated inner tube inserted.  From the back, the rolls of fat made it seem as if he was possessed of gills, and from the front, he had pendulous, swaying breasts.

The boy was eating an ice cream cone.

Chocolate was smeared around his lips, dribbling down his chin in the heat of the summer day, even dripping on his chest and belly.  While Charles was watching, the boy noticed some glop sliding down the convex surface of his tummy, and wiped it up with a plump index finger, which he promptly inserted into his mouth.

Charles shuddered.

In the many years Charles had been coming to Highsmith Beach, he had noticed a gradual, creeping encroachment that had grown from a trickle into a full-blown flood: an invasion of the obese.

It had begun just like it always does, he thought grimly, with one or two token fatties lounging uncomfortably amongst the lithe and bronzed bodies that rightfully belonged on the beach.  No one could mind them, in fact, they were a good point of interest for other people take note of to not let such a fate befall them or their loved ones.  Countless second-helpings were probably passed over because of them.

But then, no doubt emboldened by the acceptance of the corpulent pioneers, other overweight beachgoers began to arrive, and not only individually.  Entire fattie families—chubby dad, jowly mom with whole broods of porky children—began waddling onto Highsmith Beach.

And, they didn’t even act like traditional beach goers. There was no sunbathing, no wading or splashing in the surf.  No, these lumpen interlopers were content to simply sit squinting into the sun, yammering incessantly into their cell phones while their bloated offspring sat hunched over, frantically thumbing pocket-sized video games.

And eating.  They were ALWAYS eating.  The idea of an afternoon at the beach with a bottle of water and perhaps some fruit and crackers, or even a small shaker of a cooling libation was completely foreign to them.  The unloaded their giant SUVs with repasts that would sustain a small army of average humans several days—provided those humans were not particular about what they put into their bodies.  Every manner of hideous, disgusting and inedible processed concoction:  soda, chips, candy, cookies, Slim Jims, Fritos, cupcakes, sports drinks, and—one horribly memorable occasion,  cold lasagna—were shoveled into their eagerly open, endlessly masticating maws.

But, here, today, looking at the fat boy lapping up the rapidly melting ice cream, Chalres had finally had enough.

Something had to be done.

Charles watched the boy gobbling the ice cream in a frantic race against time before the warm temperature finished the job of converting it from solid to liquid form.  As if his inattentive parents had not brought enough calorie-laden food, they felt the need to allow their son to procure additional provisions from the Snack Shack that was undoubtedly doing the best business ever due to all the…..

Charles’ eyebrows raised, peeking out the tops of his Ray Ban sunglasses.  Slowly, a wide and exceptionally unpleasant smile spread across his tanned face.  He stood up, brushing sand off his legs and throwing on his shirt and a pair of casually-weathered esparadrilles that nicely matched his bathing trunks.

He tried to avert his eyes, but the acres of fattie flesh assaulted him from every direction. Charles felt like a lone slim buoy bobbing in a sea of slowly cooking blubber. He casually made his way over to the Snack Shack, where, predictably, there was a long line of children would be more appropriately attired for public presentation in muu-muus than in their various summer outfits, all with crumpled cash clutched in their sweaty, sticky, plump little fists.

Charles walked around to the deserted back of the Snack Shack, with its open-air counter in front and a battered screen door in back, where the harried staff would throw empty boxes until the day’s end, when they could collect and deposit them in the Dumpster.

Leaning against the side of the building, while, for the sake of anyone who happened to be watching, he removed one of his shoes and shook it to dislodge an imaginary stone, Charles peered inside the screen door.

Boxes and cans of food were stacked almost to the ceiling.  Most were boxes of candy and soft drink cups, but Charles also saw what he was looking for—packages that held the materials for the soft-serve ice cream machine.  As he slipped the espadrille back around his heel, he took note of the location of the soft-serve mix.  Stretching elaborately, he walked back around the front.  As he left for home, Charles noticed that, incredibly, the boy was standing near the end of the queue waiting to purchase snacks.  His ice cream not even finished yet, and he was already in line for something else.

Charles smiled even wider, and allowed his route to take him so he would intersect the line precisely where the boy stood placidly waiting like a cow in the slaughterhouse chute.

“Excuse me, young sir?” Charles said pleasantly.

From Charles’ vantage point, it appeared that the boy was using his tongue to probe the bottom of the cone for any stray ice cream.  Slowly, the child turned his droopy gaze toward the tall, thin man.  My god, Charles thought, even his eyelids are fat!

“Yeah?” the boy said, his voice coming muffled through the ice cream cone.

“I noticed you seem to be enjoying that ice cream very much, are the ones they sell here quite delicious?”

The boy hardly stopped his diligent probing to grunt, “Uh-huh.”

“I see.  That’s splendid,” Charles said, “I plan on coming here tomorrow and perhaps I will avail myself of a tasty ice cream cone then.  Do you recommend that as a plan of action?”

The boy scarcely acknowledged Charles’ question.  “Well,” Charles continued, “perhaps I shall see you again here tomorrow.”

“Yeah,” the boy said, “We’re staying here all week, and there’s nothin’ to do except hang out at this crummy beach.”

Charles smiled wider—if it were possible.  “Most excellent!”  As he walked away, he courteously added, “You seem to have a bit of ice cream on your chin, young man.”

*****

The sweeping strains of Sibelius 4^th symphony filled Charles’ cottage, and he hummed cheerfully while he worked.  Standing over a bowl he was carefully whisking, Charles wore a traditional cook’s shirt (but, whimsically, with a Mandarian collar), checked chef’s pants, a white apron, and heavy duty industrial rubber gloves.  Before him, on the counter, lay his various ingredients:  brown sugar, vanilla extract, a small block of baker’s chocolate, nitric acid, strychnine and several unmarked bottles and tins.  Peering through the bifocals he had donned, Carefully extracted an eyedropper full of amber liquid from one of the nameless bottles and added it to the mixture.  Keeping his face a prudent distance from the bowl as he mixed, Charles bobbed his head in time to the music.  While it might be the somber third movement, Charles’ demeanor was quite jovial.

Just after the moon had come up that evening, he had returned to the Snack Shack on the now deserted beach.  Working quickly, he was able to use a credit card to pop the hook and eye lock on the screen door.  Within seconds, he darted in and out and closed the screen door behind him, leaving with one object.  Charles knew whichever sleepy seasonally-employed teen that opened the Shack tomorrow would not make much of a mental note that the hook lock had not been latched, if he or she even noticed at all.

Resisting the impulse to conduct an imaginary orchestra with his now-deadly spoon, Charles instead carefully poured his concoction into the container he had liberated during his nocturnal visit.  On its side, it read:  ONE GALLON SOFT SERVE MIX.

*****

Charles sat vigorously rubbing SPF 16 lotion on his exposed arms, legs and belly.  Normally, with the sun beating down ferociously like this, he would have felt languid, but he was aquiver with anticipation.

After restoring the container to its place in the Snack Shack, he had only been able to sleep a few hours, rising just after dawn to have a piece of toast and some coffee.  Unsweetened.

Not wanting to appear overeager, he made himself wait until 9am before walking down to the beach and taking his customary place, which afforded him a sparkling view of both the water and the Snack Shack.  By noon, there was not one open spot on the sand, and people were setting up their blankets on the hot concrete of the parking lot.

The blubbery family to his immediate right had actually brought a pancake breakfast to eat on the beach, while their portable stereo blasted an endless litany of music:  the Mamas and the Papas, Blues Traveler, and Elvis singing “Suspicious Minds” from his concert at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.

But Charles did not mind.

He eagerly watched the queue in front of the Snack Shack.  With the numbers of obviously famished sunbathers, it should be only a matter of time before the soft serve ice cream machine needed to be replenished.

When he was returning from a trip to one of the cabana-like bathrooms, he almost ran right into the fat boy from the day before, who was, once again, standing in line.

Charles smiled widely, “Hello, again, young sir, are you waiting for some more delicious ice cream?”

Today, the boy had a rope of red licorice that he was chewing like cud and trailed out of the corner of his mouth like a premonition of blood.  “Huh?” he said.

“Never mind.” Charles said, and turned away.

A voice called him.  “Mister?”

Charles turned around.  The boy immediately behind the fat one was looking at him expectantly.

Charles knitted his brows.  “Yes?”

“I heard you ask him if he was getting’ some ice cream,” the boy looked at the money in his hand and then at Charles earnestly.  “I only have enough money for one thing.  D’ya think I should get a corn dog or some ice cream?”

Charles paused for a moment and looked at this child, clad only in clamdigger shorts.  Charles noted the boy’s scrawny build, with the indentations between his ribs visible and the tiny pectoral muscles still undeveloped, but also unburied by fatty deposits.

Charles smiled, only a bit less unpleasantly that before, “I’d definitely select the corn dog,” he said.

*****

Charles was dozing when the commotion awoke him.  He was in the middle of a curious dream involving female Nazi prison guards, Sibelius, and the beloved entertainer Danny Kaye when he was rudely awakened by screaming.

He opened his eyes, and there was a group of people standing almost right in front of his spot, clearly agitated.  All Charles could see was a tangle of legs, so he stood up.  Sure enough, it was the family of the fat boy in the center of the circle.

Clearly, the boy was in some distress.  He moaned and clutched his stomach, the folds of blubber and fat squeezing between his fingers like pink marshmallow fluff.  The parents were simultaneously yelling into their identical cellphones and caterwauling for help from the lifeguard, the beach patrol, the harbormaster, anyone.

Suddenly, the boy let loose with a bloodcurdling scream, and collapsed to his knees.

“Oooohhhhh!” The crowd murmured.

He shook his head like a dog that had stumbled into brambles, and hitched his chest once.  A small red droplet fell from his lips to stain the sand below him.  Whether it was licorice juice or blood, Charles had his notions, but kept them to himself.

The boy hitched his chest again, this time spewing forth air.  The crowd moved forward a step or two, people jockeying for position.  The boy began rapid hitches, sort of like deep hiccuping, but he was only bringing forth air.  The crowd, perhaps with a preternatural sense of what was to come, squinched up their faces as one, as though they were waiting for a fireworks explosion, or perhaps the opening cannon fire of a civil war reenactment battle.

On all fours, the boy performed an odd motion, somewhere between a hiccup and a sneeze, and suddenly vomited a large amount of blood and a large red object which flew about 10 feet and landed with a wet plop on the sand.

“Aaaaahhhhhh!” went the crowd, and leaned forward as one.

The moment was pregnant, the air was silent, and then someone said quite clearly, “Oh my goodness, that’s his spleen!”

Someone else—whether it was his mother or not was never determined—screamed then, and the crowd began to back away.  The wretched boy, long since past caring about public decorum, took in a great whoop of air, and snapped his head forward, vomiting what appeared to be his liver onto a set of twin blonde girls in matching jumpsuits.

Who were both eating matching ice cream cones.

The screaming was contagious now, and both of the blonde girls turned to each other—as twins so often do—and suddenly spewed long coils of dirty pinkish intestines that promptly entangled themselves in the girls’ honey-colored pigtails.

“Betty!  Veronica!” A man standing next to them said, and then burped with casual ease, and dropped the ice cream cone he had been eating onto the white sand of Highsmith Beach and cough sharply twice, like the double backfire of twin glasspack mufflers on a tricked out 72 Chevy Nova, and regurgitated two wet, glistening lumps—plop, plop—that were either a matched set of his lungs or kidneys, Charles couldn’t tell which since he was a little foggy on interior human anatomical identification.

As would be expected, all was pandemonium on the beach.  Half of the crowd was running crazily in all directions of the compass, while the other half was busy expelling their interior organs into the air through their mouths.  A girl ran shrieking past Charles, trailing the full length of her uncle’s esophagus behind her like an obscene parody of the iconic Coppertone ad. A man stumbled by, cradling his improbably emancipated stomach like a prize Portugese Man-o-War jellyfish.  An expelled heart, sailed into the air over a volleyball net and fell, unreturned, on the sand, still beating.  A small boy stood slackjawed, a dropped and forgotten corn dog by his side.

Charles nodded satisfactorily to himself.  He carefully unscrewed the lid on his bottle of Fiji water and took a prodigious drink.  This should do nicely to curb the overweight incursion, he thought.

And he was right.

*****

It was the first Saturday after Labor Day.  Highsmith Beach was virtually deserted.  There was no chill in the air, no fading of the summer sunshine even though autumn was on the way.  Sure, after what the newspapers called “Black Beach Day” there had been a small smattering of gorehounds and creeps who came to gawk at the spot where It Had All Happened, but for the most part, the beach remained a pariah to the hordes of eager sunbathers looking for a peaceful excursion.

Except for Charles.

Every day, he had gone to his usual spot on the beach and set up his blanket.  He religiously slathered himself with sunscreen and hydrated himself by drinking water.  It was the best second half of the summer he could remember since he had started coming to the beach all those years ago.  No more disgusting fat blobs sprawled all over his beach.  He smiled his unpleasant smile and dozed happily in the sun.

*****

It was, Freddie Swisher decided, an abomination.

This beautiful slice of beach, HIS beach, and here it was, spoiled by some disgusting old people who should be in the rest home and not polluting the great outdoors with their nasty, veiny, scabarous ruined shells of human bodies.

He lifted his Zeiss Binoculars to his eyes and gazed disbelievingly at the most egregious offender.  Some random, friendless old geezer who came to the beach every day and put on a horror show of wrinkled, shriveled old flesh that was too horrible to even compare favorably to shoe leather.

Well, Freddie had had enough.  Yesterday, while the old bastard was dozing he had swiped the bottle of sunscreen the old fart brought every day and replaced it with a little something he had cooked up in his home chemistry lab.

“Let’s see how the fucker likes a surprise,” Freddie thought, and smiled.

On the beach, Charles came awake from his doze, wondering why it seemed his pores all itched at once, as though a million tiny red spiders were trying to escape through them.

Oh, they were.

###

Originally published on www.Killer-Works.com © 2008, 2010 Bill Breedlove