one hundred dead seagulls (prose)

7/2/18 6:22 PM

one hundred dead seagulls

one of my hidden talents turns out to be digging holes. my father says it’s the irish blood in me, but i think it’s a natural rhythm for me to tear things out of the ground. i was spending a lot of weekends digging holes for one reason or another that summer and chief of all holes i dug was a shallow grave for at least one hundred seagulls that washed up on the shore of the beach i worked at. i was no stranger to death and dying at the park, usually i’d find the corpses of a few fish and a seagull on the beach, and it was like any other trash run- just a few unlucky bastards on the shore. the most melancholy i ever got on corpse cleanup was the day i found a fox pup on the shore, devoid of its eyes. between that and the suicide attempts i’d witnessed i thought myself steeled against nature’s brutality. the sheer amount of dead seagulls, mostly fledglings that lay dead that day, with their wings torn by lake currents and their heads plucked of all feathers made me realize that i couldn’t just let these animals fester in the sun, that i had a responsibility to some cosmic force of the universe or maybe to that eternally guilty irish blood in my veins to give them a proper burial. i loaded up all of their corpses in four trash bags and drove away from the beach to a secluded area of the waterfront woods that people used to smoke pot and run away from their failing marriages and began to dig. i dug for an hour, making a four foot by one foot hole about a foot deep in the rocky, sandy excuse for soil. once i had finished digging, i emptied them into the pit i had dug to find that without measurement or foresight i had naturally dug a hole big enough for one hundred or so seagull corpses, and wondered if it was a sign from god to become a ditch digger. it was a sorrowful moment covering them up, and i did hope somewhere deep inside me that they would all spring to life somehow and take off for greener pastures. no bird i had seen that day ended up living after the ride to the woods. once they were all covered i placed a stone i had dug up from their grave on top of the pile, and said a few solemn words to no one in particular. i do not know if i was preordained to find all of those gulls on the shores of gallagher beach that day, but i know for a fact that it wouldn’t have phased the other workers at the park, and certainly that they would have wordlessly left them to rot in ninety five degree heat in a dumpster instead of a foot underneath the ground. i don’t know if i gained some sort of karma for an unmarked grave full of seagulls, but it is my hope that i am shown the same kindness wherever my rotting corpse shows up.