On the Beach: From Far and Wide

Plough snails are exceptionally well adapted to detecting dead creatures the tide has deposited on the beach for them and other scavengers to feed on.

See them at work in this excellent video. 

At a young age I developed an interest in dying, death and decay. In Ecclesiastes, which is one of my favourite books in the Old Testicle (ha ha), along with Job and Jonah, there is an assessment of the life cycle which strikes me as pretty accurate:

I said in my heart with regard to the children of man that God is testing them that they may see that they themselves are but beasts.
For what happens to the children of man and what happens to the beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and man has no advantage over the beasts, for all is vanity.
All go to one place. All are from the dust, and to dust all return.
Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down into the earth?
So I saw that there is nothing better than that a man should rejoice in his work, for that is his lot. Who can bring him to see what will be after him?

About 20 years ago my interest in the decomposition process was reawakened and I did some research in order to write a fictional piece about a forensic entomologist. The story is set on a smallholding in Rhodesia in the late 1950’s. In this extract the protagonist’s wife has just committed suicide.

After finding her he spent the night sitting in the front room, the pressure lamp burning, the curtains undrawn. When the sun rose he went to the outbuilding and pushed open the big door. It swung halfway and scraped to a halt on the concrete floor. She was still hanging there. How could it be otherwise? The air stirred and a swirl of dust moved in, faltered and lay still. He entered and a rat scurried for cover behind the rusting hammer mill. She had attached the rope to the tie beam of the central truss, the stepladder lay on its side. The short drop had not been sufficient to break her neck; instead it was the slip noose that had strangled her. Her canvass takkies pointed downward as if saying, Look, only nine inches to go. Her shoulders were hunched forward and her arms dangled loosely. With the back of his fingers he felt her cold flesh and she gave an inch and swung back; half an inch and back. 

For most of the day he sat on the veranda looking out through the mosquito wire, thinking of her hanging from the beam. As the hours passed anxiety began to build in him. He had to do something. Already it was going to be difficult explaining why he had not reported this last night. They had been so innocent and yet their lives had been ruined so quickly. Unreality surrounded him and he felt utterly alone in an empty, forsaken world. Yet the idea had begun to form and the conviction was growing as his nervousness increased. He had to do something and it had to be something that could at least partially justify or atone for this squandering of her life. She had been a scientist and an agnostic, unsentimental and fundamentally utilitarian. She would have approved.

It was easier to undress her where she hung. When she was stripped he positioned the ladder behind her and, with considerable difficulty, loosened the rope and took her down. Out in the hot sun he walked the hundred yards to the run and was sweating and out of breath when he lowered her to the ground. Bent double he backed in, dragging her after him, his hands in her armpits. In the middle of the empty chicken run she lay full length on her back amidst the dried-out weeds whilst he opened her abdominal cavity with a deep longitudinal incision from sternum to below the umbilicus. Then he turned her over, positioning her left arm behind her and her right arm crooked upward. Gently he prised open her jaws. 

"As I stood up, I was gratified to notice the arrival of the first blow flies, whose green metallic glint meant they were of the Lucidiae genus. I closed the gate and went back to the house for my notebook and bush hat."

He spent seven months observing the decomposition of his wife and collecting the data upon which his career as forensic entomologist was to be built. In due course he discovered she was to be visited by a succession of four categories of insect. The first was that comprising the primary bio degraders whose purpose it was to recycle the bulk of organic matter. The second category consisted of parasites and predators that fed on the larvae of the first category. The third category specialised in the consumption of exudates, while the fourth category performed no function at all, merely looking and then moving on. The blow flies were by far the most industrious and brought about rapid change in the early stages. Ants assisted the flies by day, eating through the epidermis and causing lesions that could be used by the flies to gain access to the body. By night the smaller rodents assisted by gnawing the flesh from the extremities, thus providing further access. The family of hide-and-skin beetles known as Dermistidae took over from the flies when Mrs Witherspoon began to dry out.

“Finally came the Trox beetles, family Trogidae. If one can ever say finally. The process goes on, to dust and beyond. But certainly the last horde of bulk degraders arrived in the form of the Trox beetles, which specialised in the recycling of hair. It was time to conclude the field study. The notes I packed in a suitcase and my specimens, hundreds of them, all labelled, I placed in trunks. This was my magnum opus. As for Gladys, I gathered together what was left of her, coaxed the old hammer mill into life, and kibbled her into a coarse meal to be dispersed in the open veld."

I wonder if plough snails would go to work on a corpse if it was washed up? I suspect they would if the body was already decomposing and lying below the high water mark.

To view my longer work as an author, you can find me on Smashwords here.

The Ugly Duckling

She gave birth to three girls, one after the other. This displeased her husband, because he felt ashamed to be surrounded by females all the time. Finally, she produced a son, and this made him so proud of himself that she quickly churned out another one. By this time she was exhausted and declared that she would rather die than have any more.

Six years passed. And then one day she felt strange and before she knew it a naked neonate came wriggling out of her. She would have liked to flush it down the toilet but, because it was another boy, her husband forbade her to do this.

He soon regretted interfering, though, as this one was a runt. It was very small and feeble, and was horrible to look at, its eyes were so close set and its nose was so short and flat like a pig’s. The three sisters regarded their new brother with revulsion and prayed that nothing like this would ever be dragged out of them, greedily screaming for milk from their tits.

The two brothers, who were already more than five feet tall and well on the way to becoming the brutes their father envisaged, wanted nothing to do with this pathetic specimen and ignored him for several years.

He was provided with a proper name to put on his birth certificate and other official documents but he soon became known exclusively as Stompie, on account of his short stature. Until he left school he was only ever referred to as Stompie and he grew up being ridiculed, bullied and humiliated at every turn.

When he was about ten or eleven years old his brothers, who by then  both played First Team rugby and had started shaving their chins decided that it was time the little pipsqueak should make himself of use to them. From then on, until they left home and went out to work, they required Stompy to provide them with both manual and oral services on a regular basis. He knew that he would be beaten mercilessly if he failed to comply. It was out of the question for him to confide in his mother, she being a woman steeped in Biblical teachings, and he certainly would not risk giving his father any ideas.

To resist victimization, he tried to make himself physically strong by eating gluttonously, but this only made him fat and resulted in him taking on the appearance of a walking meatball. In his misery he turned to God and prayed for help. When he received no response to his pleas, he concluded that God, too, was another enemy and that he was wasting his time looking for an ally in that quarter.  He would have to rely on himself to vanquish his adversaries.

Overcoming his fear of them, he asked his father and brothers a list of questions and concluded from their answers that the computing power of his own brain was superior to all three of theirs combined. He resolved to use his mental prowess to succeed in the world and wreak vengeance on the bullies and those who mocked him.

From school he made his way straight to a university and studied diligently to become a legal practitioner. Once fully qualified he returned to his home town, established himself as an attorney, and went about punishing those who had wronged him. He did this primarily by sowing division and encouraging people to take legal action against one another. Having inside knowledge of underhand dealings, illicit trading and marital infidelities he was able to alert the police and the Revenue Service, and provide evidence to be used in divorce proceedings.  Although he cut a comical figure in his black legal gown that was too long for him and trailed on the ground like a train, the sight of him soon instilled fear in the townsfolk and derision and mockery were replaced by obsequious grovelling and extravagant flattery.

He made sure that both of his brothers went to jail on trumped up charges and were regularly sodomised by tattooed gangsters. When his parents grew old and infirm, he placed them in an under-funded state institution and never visited them, not even on their death beds. He became a wealthy man with great influence but his sisters knew they would receive no assistance, no matter how dire their circumstances might be.

On his 50th birthday he gorged himself on rich food, became too drunk to stand on his feet, suffered a massive heart attack and died.

At his funeral service the church was overflowing with those who had come to rejoice that he was dead. There was a party atmosphere and not the slightest trace of solemnity. The mayor delivered a eulogy in which he described how the departed had terrorised the town and inflicted great suffering and misery on so many of its inhabitants. He said that the reason for Stompie’s vicious vindictiveness could be attributed to the cruel treatment he has received as a child at the hands of his family, society and fate. He had been born small and ugly through no fault of his own and had been punished for not being big strong and handsome. He had taken revenge and shown no pity, just as he himself had been tormented without mercy.

The mayor concluded his speech on a philosophical note by comparing Stompie’s behaviour to that of a dog and the average human being. If a dog is chained up, half-starved and whipped it will turn permanently vicious and attack anything that comes near it. Likewise, if people are mistreated, they will become dangerous and will round on their own kind. This explained Stompie’s remorseless malevolence, and it also shed light on why humans were in constant conflict with everything in the world around them. He said that once individuals are confronted by their own mortality, the shock and disappointment is so subconsciously traumatic they react by taking revenge on the weak and vulnerable. In spite of telling themselves stories about Paradise and life after death they know deep down, they are deluding themselves and inevitably life will be overcome by suffering and death. That is why they behave so abominably.

(Taken from Fairy Tales and Nursery Rhymes.)

To view my longer work as an author, you can find me on Smashwords here.

On the Beach: The Human Onslaught Continues

The sun was setting. At the top of the steps leading down to the beach a lookout was on his phone. At the bottom of the steps a man in a wet suit was busy shucking perlemoen. We passed him and made our way over the dune to the shore.  The tide had turned and was beginning to recede. It was a perfect winter’s evening with just a faint breeze from the south, the sea was milky blue and untroubled. As we walked, we could hear men in the water calling to each other and ahead of us the sunset haze was taking on colour. She stooped to pick up a tangle of fishing line. Beside it on the sand the sea had left bits of degrading kelp and a scattering of nurdles and microplastics. At the boardwalk we paused to absorb the deceptively tranquil scene and then headed for home

The following extract is from my 2008 novel Pop-splat.

Journalism students were required, as part of the course, to conduct an interview with an interesting person, write it up and submit it to the lecturer. It could be an individual or joint effort, so Matt was more than happy to team up with Ed on this one. Otherwise he probably wouldn’t have bothered at all.

Ed chose the subject: a 55-year-old Sociology lecturer who was about to retire. ‘Interview with a Cynic’, he wrote at the top of a page in his notebook.

“What I like about this guy,” Ed told Matt, “is his uncompromising honesty. He tells it how it is, not how it’s supposed to be.”

They went to the lecturer’s house in a residential area overlooking the town. He was a tall, fit-looking man with thick curly hair that was going grey. Ed asked him about his academic career and his plans for the future, and he and Matt took notes. Some of his comments were to stick in Matt’s memory and come back to him later.

Q: Do you have children?

A: No. My wife and I decided not to obey the biological imperative to reproduce ourselves. It was a conscious choice because we believed there was no long-term future for humanity. As atheists we don’t believe that we were put here for a purpose, and we don’t believe in a supernatural power who has a plan for us. On the contrary, we feel sure that our species will be a short-lived one in the context of geological time. Nor do we adhere to the idea that we have evolved into a superior organism and now hold a privileged position in the universe.

Q: Are you interested in, or concerned about, what happens in the future once you’ve gone?

A: No, not at all. If I had had children, I would have been obliged, as a genetically programmed social animal, to pretend that I have a link to the future and that it’s important I care about what might happen to my offspring. While my intellect tells me this is absurd. Not having offspring though, I don’t have to pretend.

Q: I see you drive a large SUV. Don’t you care about global warming and the impact you have on the environment?

A: No, for two reasons. Firstly, I think it’s far too late to have any influence on climate change. And secondly, not being an admirer of the human race, I feel it would be better for all other organisms if humans were to disappear from the planet. Climate change might help to bring that about rather sooner than later.

Click here to read Pop-splat!