Varadero Malarrimo, Vizcaíno Desert
Baja California
An angel named Ed Ghee showed up on Malarrimo Beach, a good place to conduct research. He was intrigued by the confluence of the Kuroshio Current and the California Current. The gyres were like great rivers, the longest rivers in the world. But no one thought of that. The gyres got no credit. At Malarrimo everything—simply everything—got caught in the currents and washed up on shore. Malarrimo was a giant horn spoon, grabbing anything that floated by. It looked like that time at Megiddo; stuff was strewn all about.
The shore was deserted but Ed Ghee felt proud of his disguise. He had acquired some peón clothes, including sandals with agave fiber that went between his toes. It wasn’t half bad. He worked at assembling the flotsam, though some of it was technically jetsam. Piling it up wasn’t easy. A lot of people thought angels had superior strength, but it wasn’t true. In some ways they were worse off than men. Angels were solitary creatures. They were terrifying, even to each other.
He began by gathering a pile of ship parts. Anchors, knees, masts, booms, and spars. A name plate: Novia del Mar. Someone thought the ocean had a fiancé. Men were lonely, he surmised. He never struggled with loneliness. Angels neither married nor were given in marriage.
Next he assembled a mound of glass bottles. Then a pile of pearl oyster shells. Then a mountain of fishing gear. Nets, lines, hooks of metal, bone, and wood. Glass buoys like swirling spheroidal mockups of different planets. The globes made him feel more at home. Malarrimo was a desolate place. The wind never stopped sandblasting him.
He made a fifth pile of religious accouterments: chalices and patens, a worn breviary, labavo towels, altar cloths, missals, ciboria, aspersoria, and thuribles. Atop the pile he seated a small wooden saint with a broken arm.
In a sixth pile he gathered mining paraphernalia: lanterns, picks, bowls, candles, and Sticking Tommies. From the top of the pile he could see Sierra El Placer. There was much more to those hills than gold. But it was too late; someone had already given the mountains a name, and now there was no other way of seeing them. That was the trouble with names.
The desert suffered the same problem. People called a lot of places the desert. They even called a state of mind the desert. But this was the real desert. The sand was near white. Crackling bushes hunkered against the harrying wind, clinging to the soil for dear life. Ed Ghee saw no movement at all, not even a tumbleweed. He would have given anything to see a tumbleweed. Instead there were lots of squatty plants. He kept stepping over halophytes, the salt lovers, and psammophytes, the sand lovers. He tried not to openly step on the lovers. Here everything was very sparse. The cost of taking an organism was much greater than say, from a swamp in the Midwest.
The desert ran right up to the sea. On the beach he assembled a pile of coconuts from faraway shores. Perched atop the great green drupes, he began reading the messages in bottles. One by one he extracted the little determinate drifters. They held a lot of clues. Some letters were fairly dripping with skanky booze. Others were inscribed on pieces of wood. It was just like The Tale of the Heike.
I said I would write, someone penned.
Another offered a two-shilling reward. Was this taken in a trawl-net? the note asked.
There were lots of communiqués from children. Someone lost a cat named Kismet. A boy named Boyle enjoyed playing Bloody Knuckles. Tell me where you picked this up. Please!
Some had sketches of mermaids, but they were drawn in a manner that seemed a flimsy excuse to illustrate women’s breasts.
One note was sent by Theophrastus. There are many remedies to cure love, he wrote. But never a one of them is infallible. He also wrote about honey and swooning.
Other letters were terribly sad. A young marooned yeoman was growing very thin. I am not sure anyone is thinking of me, he said.
Some were full of regrets. Forgive me for not knowing how to protect you from death. Forgive me for not finding words when you slipped through my fingers.
Some letters were polite. Dear Finder. Dear sir or madam, youth or maid. To someone beautiful and far away. Ed Ghee put this letter in his pocket.
The eighth pile comprised an assemblage of bones. Pelicans, vultures, coyotes. Lepus californicus. Sea turtles. Kangaroo rats, deer mice, desert woodrats, silky pocket mice. It was shocking how many relations a mouse could have.
The whale bones were too heavy to stack. Instead, Ed Ghee dragged the bones together and made a whole new whale out of them. He sat in the center of it.
—You haven’t got it quite right, a voice said.
Ed Ghee noticed a whale floating in the surf. He told the whale to mind its own business. But the whale kept bobbing there, watching him with a rolling eye.
—I wonder if you’re playing Jonah, the whale remarked. People spend a lot of time contemplating the meaning of the narrative, but nobody ever thinks of how it went for the poor ungulate.
—Successful people never worry about what others are doing, Ed Ghee said.
Over the years he had saved what he felt were the best retorts.
—I like your sandals, the whale said. Then it swam away.
At first Ed Ghee thought the whale was faking it. He sat on the shore and kept watch for spouts. But the whale did not return. He thought of leaving, of going back to the Pleistocene. Those were the salad days.
One day an old sailor washed up on the beach, blanched blue as a fetus in a mother’s womb. Swimming again in the salty brine. The human was very impermanent. Things had been feeding on him already. His eye sockets were wide with fossilized astonishment.
*First published in Faultline, 2018
For more Baja California stories, you can pre-order Muia’s award-winning novel, A Desert Between Two Seas, coming September 15, 2025 from the University of Georgia Press. https://ugapress.org/book/9780820374383/a-desert-between-two-seas/
Amy Muia is the winner of the 2024 Flannery Award for Short Fiction for her novel A Desert Between Two Seas, forthcoming September 15 with the University of Georgia Press. Her stories and articles have appeared in The Baltimore Review, The Beloit Fiction Journal, Chicago Review, Image Journal, Water~Stone Review, West Branch, AWP’s The Writer’s Chronicle, and other journals. Her work has been anthologized in The Orison Anthology and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Find out more at www.amuia.net.