"Mōhai Beach" by Joshua Ginsberg

Mōhai Beach

By Joshua Ginsberg

Even as the small, inflatable boat with motor, the kind you see Navy SEALs using in movies, scrapes sand as they reach the shore, Zach is still pretending he doesn’t really know why he’s here. But he does know why. It’s because of Issue #31 of Tender Teen Flesh, from the summer of 1980, when he was on the cusp of becoming a teen himself. It’s because of that magazine, which was quietly pulled from store shelves and never reprinted or put online. The one that collectors refer to in hushed tones as “the Dead Girls Issues.”

At the time, Zach had seen nudity before, or flashes of it anyhow, but never so steady, full on, celebrated in such a way. Girls lying on a beach (none of whom, incidentally, were teens), fully nude, shaved, exposed, glistening, atop shimmering sands. He dreamed himself there, among them, a thousand times at least.

If he closes his eyes, he can still see them now. Blonds, brunets, redheads, seven of them in all, side by side, laying on the beach. Spread out like an offering. To the camera. To the viewer.

Then he heard the rumors from friends in his school. The girls on the beach weren’t squinting their eyes against the sun. There had been some sort of accident on the boat where they were partying during the shoot, and all either got poisoned, or overdosed or drowned, depending on who was telling the story. Their bodies were brought to the shore and laid there until the rescue and recovery team arrived. But the magazine still needed one more shot, so someone snapped a picture of them side by side there on the beach. That was the photo that went into the magazine.

Learning this did something to Zach – fused ideas of sex and death together in an uncomfortable way within his still developing adolescent mind that had stayed with him ever since. For years, at night, he dreamed of them, heard them whisper across time, space and mortality, to come party with them. Come be with them, for real and forever. 

It was not something he could discuss or express to anyone without shame and embarrassment that made his face and blood get hot, not even with a long-standing intimate partner, if he’d still had one. Certainly, had he and Leslie not called things off, he would not be here now, on a remote island in the South Pacific, wading through the warm frothy surf with a hired guide towards the beach.

It had started just a few weeks earlier, when he saw the background of an online travel advertisement, and recognized the white sand beach. That beach. And he knew he had to see it. The place where those models had lain bare, whether they had done so alive and voluntarily, or if they had been placed there. Posed and displayed, postmortem. Like perfectly smooth mannequins. For the first time in decades, he heard their siren sweet, watery voices again in his dreams, calling out to him. Begging him to come.

Contrary to how it was described in the brochure, the beach was not “easily accessible.” Some beaches were, sure, but not the beach Zach needed to see. This particular beach, at the base of a steep cliff, was virtually inaccessible. He asked around and guide after guide dissuaded him from what they called Mōhai Beach. There was nothing there for him, no bars, no shopping, just a bad strip of sand. The cliff made it suicidal to try to reach by land, and jagged rocks made it just as dangerous to approach by sea. Some got angry and told him to leave. Even when he offered two, three, four times their regular rates, still they all declined to assist him. All except one, found far off the paved roads and sidewalks, in a part of the island most visitors never saw. There, a muscular, heavily tattooed, deeply tanned man with a ragged scar diagonal across his face and one milky white eye agreed to take him. For cash up front, and lots of it.

Now he’s here, really here, at the beach in person, carried by an excitement he can’t put words too. And there on beach, where those models once were, he sees in each of their places a mound of sand.

As he nears the sand formations, he realizes they aren’t dunes, drifts, rocks or any sort of natural feature. They’re bodies, made of sand. The seven girls from the photo are there, side by side, but so are many others. Too many to count. Women, men, children. The stretch on, presumably, to the end of the beach.

Tentatively, he kneels beside the one that would have been the brunette in the center of the photo, and stokes the sand along her leg. And then she pushes herself up on her arms, impossibly, and stares at him with unseeing eyes set in her ageless, perfectly sand sculpted face.

“Why are you here? Why have you come?” she rasps and grips his arm with one of her hands. Surprisingly strong. Urgent.

“For you,” he wants to tell her, but she crumbles into a pile of sand before he can even get the first word. Suddenly he’s holding sand and something underneath, like a long piece of driftwood. 

Only, he realizes after a moment, it isn’t driftwood. It’s bone.

“What… What the fuck is this?”

He turns to look at the guide coming up the beach from the boat, who has unsheathed from his belt a long and wickedly curved blade. Its keen edge catches the sun and gleams.

“You heard them call, yes? The dead ones?”

Zach nods.

“You should have known better than to answer.”

Knowledge and resignation crash over him, spilling in through the door of his prefrontal cortex. He understands that he will get exactly what he has secretly always wanted. 

To be there on the beach with his dead dream girls. 

Forever.