I saw them looking at me, at my body lying there in the sand. They had so many expressions. I saw fear on a guy's face, peace on an elderly woman's; a kid about my age looked scared and thrilled. A woman, maybe in her thirties, was wearing a red windbreaker. What I saw on her face was a form of comprehension. Another woman, a teacher of mine, looked like she was trying to solve a mathematical theorem. She was my tutor.

People think that being dead is bad, but death lacks morality. It might be pleasant or unpleasant, comfortable or uncomfortable. Maybe you like hot soup and you wish you had some but you don't. It could be like that in death. But nothing in life prepares you for the absence of solutions that exist here.

People don't stop asking you for things when you're dead. It's not like in school where there are forms you have to fill out or in the doctor's office. It's more like requests that you hear. People want to know things: why you died, if you wanted to die, if you miss your life, if you're happier without it. They expect answers, but you can't give them any.

There are no angels. It's not even an actual place. It's more like an idea that you've always had in the back of your head that suddenly makes sense. Things are the way they're supposed to be. Like I said, there's no morality here.

When I was alive I liked to play chess. There was usually a point in the game where I knew I had my pieces aligned in such a way that my opponent would lose their king. I just waited for their pieces to fall into place and then there it would be: checkmate. It's like that here, it's like being checkmated, or like having checkmated someone else. But that's a victory that doesn't last long. Things stop remaining constant. I even forgot what I was just thinking. Now I'm remembering something else; my mother's lipstick, or my sister's hairbrush. A dog I used to hang out with down the street, a mutt, that died. And then they're gone and I see myself again, on the beach, surrounded by people who only knew me vaguely.

That's something I don't understand. People seem to care that I'm gone. But I don't. Not that I like to see my mom crying, or my sister lying on her bed, holding one of my T-shirts in this really sad way. I mean that caring is something that the living do. Caring, now, has been replaced with something else. A kind of absence.

You want to know how I got here. That's natural. Where I am now, things cease to be of any nature. I can tell you that when I was alive I liked chess, and girls, and music, and doing drugs. I didn't OD. I wasn't stupid, except the way people are always stupid in one form or another. Like I didn't use condoms always. I didn't wear a seatbelt. I drove even though I didn't have a license. None of those things are relevant now. When you're dead, every small fracture on yourself that you believed was wrong turns out to be irrelevant. Not that being dead is reassuring, it's not.

I really liked it at the beach; I wouldn't admit that to anyone when I was alive. Other kids thought I was alright. I wasn't hassled. Getting up early to walk on the sand is a cheezy, lover's thing to do, so I wouldn't confess that to the guys I hung out with. I did tell my teacher that I liked it there, though. She was nice to me, and smart. She didn't question the bruises. She let me eat platefuls of Oreos. I freaked one time, when we were reading this one writer, I can't remember his name. There was a passage in it about this kid's dad. His dad was fucked up, hurt the kid, did creepy shit to him. I didn't want to finish that book, and my teacher said I had to. After that lesson I went down to the water and I threw the book in the ocean, which was useless because the waves brought the book back to my feet, only it was soggy and ruined, and I still had to read it.

My teacher said my intelligence was off the scale. She couldn't understand why my grades were so bad when I had a college-level brain. That's why she was tutoring me.

It was a random thing, my death. I couldn't sleep that night. I was reading that book, crinkled and warped from the water, and my bed felt gross, it felt like it stank. I put on my jeans and sneakers and T-shirt and walked to the beach. I guess I thought it would soothe me.

I forgot my asthma medication. It was around two in the morning and I wasn't thinking asthma, I was thinking that I needed to breathe that sea-salty air and relax. I started wheezing, and then it just got out of control, my breathing, I mean -- it stopped.

My mom was nice to me, generally, but we didn't have a lot of money after my dad left. She worried about my sister's education. My mom was big on education. She also wanted me to have clean clothes even if they were three years old and two sizes too small. I was always coming to school in these short pants and wrong-colored shirts. But people liked me anyway. I don't know why, and it's unimportant. I didn't stand out, there was nothing extraordinary about me. When you're dead you understand the irony: in life no one is special, but in death everyone is. Usually you think it's the reverse.

I said before that there's an absence. It's for the thing you always wanted to say and couldn't. Like holding something inside, concealing it. But the concept of secrecy, once you've let go of the hands of the living, has no meaning. Secrets have lost their potency.

I never wanted to tell people about my dad. Some kids are just waiting until someone, some kind stranger, gives them permission to speak. I knew kids like that. But I never said anything. Why do it? It would hurt other people more than what he did to me. It would have hurt my mom. I guess the only reason I even mention it now is because of my sister. She knew what was going on. He never did it to her, he wasn't interested in girls. He liked boys. Younger than me, really, but I was right there, every night, until he left. Then I guess he went on to someone else.

Look — that woman, over there — she's crying. The one in the red windbreaker. She knows why it's okay. I can sort of feel her insides, a private pain that makes her understand things. Like how one boy less in the world is no different than one boy more.

They know my name now.

I can smell something good — a combination of brownies and cinnamon. I miss certain things. Cigarettes, playing chess, my mom and my sister. The beach, too, with its repetition. All of those waves coming in and then receding. Sometimes they bring things in from the sea with them — shells, broken glass, wood all bent and twisted — and sometimes they just keep coming, making the sand finer and finer. If it went on forever the beach would turn into glass.


©Laura Migdal.

Laura Migdal was born in New York City in 1968. She has a B.A. from Hampshire College and an M.F.A. from Sarah Lawrence College, and has been the recipient of numerous writing residencies and fellowships. Migdal has taught creative writing at Hampshire College, and English at the University of New Mexico. Her prose and poetry have been published in BOMB, Other Voices, The 13th Warrior Review, The Doomed City, and gestalten. She lives in northern New Mexico with her husband, two cats, and three dogs.
Migdal's first book, a novel called Parachute Woman, is available from LEGIBLE. Go here to read a selection from it.

Download The Boy as a PDF.