Salt and Rust
Short fiction by E. Seneca about South Florida's dark side. "The suffocating heat, the brutal sun, the choking humidity," Seneca writes. "What makes this such a wonderful escape, you’re not sure."
EVERY YEAR, THEY COME. Often before the weather has even cooled, before you can stand to be outside for five minutes instead of two before you start sweating. They flock to the ocean like creatures parched for moisture, eager to bathe in its lukewarm shallows and beach themselves on the sand like slabs of meat, slowly roasting from pale to lobster crimson on their garishly-colored towels.
But there’s nothing special about the sea. Maybe it feels that way because you’ve grown up with it, so it’s just another ordinary aspect of life, like the sweltering humidity and the mosquitoes, but even when you sit in traffic on your way to work and stare out at it, trying to muster up some semblance of appreciation, the dark, murky water washing over the shore holds no appeal. The beach is covered in brown seaweed you can almost smell the fishy scent of, while beachcombers drive across the dunes, gathering it up in vain before the tourists arrive, before the next tide washes in more.
As far as the eye can see, there are palm trees. Once in a while, you find a spreading oak to rest your gaze, but just as it’s reaching the stage where it offers ample shade, it’s removed and replaced by yet another palm tree. It’s a siege of palm trees, you think, envisioning them as an army, slowly seeking to assimilate all others. The baking sun filters through the fronds, the bobbing leaves looking charmingly tropical, but they only bring you a vague sense of despair. A broad canopy, to shield the road from the brunt of the heat, would be infinitely more relaxing to look at.
When you arrive at the oceanfront condo where you work, the first thing you notice is the rust, flecking anything metallic within a square mile. This is something that the tourists never seem to realize, when they lean on the balustrades of their balconies: the slow, insidious consumption of everything in reach. You can taste the salt in the saturated air, even though the sheer size of the buildings, lined up like dominoes, block out the shore from the road and the sidewalk. You hasten inside, gathering your cleaning materials, eager to be free of the salt before your skin gets sticky and your hair gets frizzy.
But it clings to your fingertips as you wipe the tables, making them feel them grainy and grubby; films up your glasses and your windshield with a fine spray; sticks to your lips and teeth in the most unpleasant of ways. The tourists leave the windows and doors open to get the “fresh air” and the “sea breeze,” and perhaps to save a little on air conditioning, despite the futility of this endeavor. In the humid air, everything smells stronger, and despite your best efforts, you’re sweating. You can smell it when you lift your arms to dust the shelves and clean the cabinets. You’re always sweating. And no matter how low the temperature is, the stickiness never goes away.
“Don’t leave the windows open too much,” you warn, in another vain attempt to make them listen. “Everything rusts.” You indicate the new stainless steel appliances in the kitchen, their metal dotted with spreading, devouring orange spots. It’ll be a pain to clean off, but you don’t have a choice.
Some of them smile blithely, ignorance dancing in their pale eyes. Others make a noncommittal agreement. Some joke, “That’s why I pay you.” You smile back stiffly. They don’t understand.
They don’t see what you see, don’t know what everyone who was born and raised here knows. They don’t see how the glass tables and the mirrors fog up with strange, smoky patterns. They don’t feel the scorching burn of the sun even as their skin turns raw and starts to peel, sloughing off in long white strips. They don’t taste the calcium hardness of the water, nor notice just how yellow it is when they fill their sinks and bathtubs, how it smells vaguely of fish. The salt creeps in behind their picture frames, slowly warping the colors within despite the supposed airtightness. The glossy paper and the ink stand no chance, just as all the manners of technology—televisions, air conditioners, computers—have their life drained by the very air around them. One day, inexplicably, they simply stop working, their insides rotted beneath their feeble casings.
The wind seeps in around the windows, carrying grains of sand high up dozens of stories. It’s strangely inevitable, and strangely ironic: the thick glass is hurricane-proof, and muffles the constant dull roaring of the ocean, but many of them don’t fit right. There are tiny gaps around the frames where the wind whistles in, and the windowsills fill up with sticky piles of sand and dust. They’ll hold strong against a storm, and yet the might of the ocean still finds a way in to continue its slow destruction.
On some metals, rather than reddish-orange, the rust takes a greenish hue. The blotchy verdigris is uncommon and thus strangely captivating in the way it lays siege to the handles of the balcony doors and the balustrades that you never get too near. Looking down all those floors makes you feel sick and dizzy, as if some invisible force will suddenly hurl you over and you’ll plummet to your death, so instead you focus on the overlapping bubbles of green consuming the metal door frame. You keep meaning to take some pictures, to turn it into a timelapse, but you always forget, and anyway, taking your phone out from the safety of your bag doesn’t seem wise. But each time you come to this particular apartment, the green rust has increased. You wipe the salt every time you clean the balcony, but it does no good.
The ocean roars dully in the background, white breakers foaming over the sand. At times, it looks like an enormous lagoon, clear and green when it’s peaceful, but more often than not it’s rough and choppy. Regardless of the storminess of the water, the only time the beach is empty is when it’s raining. The tourists cannot resist the pull of the ocean, desperate to return home with tanned skin as proof of their trip, heedless of just how painfully inflamed their flesh always looks.
You wonder what the cold feels like in the places they are fleeing from, what snow looks like. You’ve seen pictures of it, but it looks unreal. You often think how nice it would be to not sweat for a little while, to not feel your skin become an oil slick by the end of the day when there’s only so many layers a person can remove. The only cold you ever feel lasts for a day or two, perhaps a week. You rejoice briefly at the ability to wear your few rarely-used jackets, but all too soon they are replaced back in the closet to grow musty. You cannot say you see the appeal of this weather. The suffocating heat, the brutal sun, the choking humidity. What makes this such a wonderful escape, you’re not sure.
The vastness of the sea is unsettling, stretching so far along the horizon. It’s a relief to be back inside behind the windows, away from the blinding enormity, but in the apartments that have mirrored walls, you can still see it in the corner of your eye. It gives you the bizarre sensation of being watched. The ocean isn’t alive, you tell yourself, over and over, but despite your best efforts, it still feels like a lie.
There is no hiding from the ocean, or the salt. It is inevitable, its progression inexorable.
At the end of the day, you pack up your things, all grubby and sticky, and take the elevator down seventeen floors. You note as usual that there’s no thirteenth floor. There are six elevators in the building, and half the time, one of them isn’t working. There are phones inside, but the niggling fear of being trapped within the rattling box is always present.
Even in the garage, your car’s paint is faded from the sun, and peeling away in certain areas to reveal blotchy orange stains eating away at the metal. You immediately sanitize your hands when you get inside, the sticky feeling nigh-unbearable by this point. It still clings, the smell of alcohol turning sour on your skin.
The foreign security guard smiles at you and waves as you drive out of the basement. Her palms are covered in orange stains, her skin inflamed and flaking around them, just like the tourists’. One hand is bandaged, ostensibly because she cut it. You’ve tried to warn her, too, but the language barrier seems to have mangled your intent. When you get home, you inspect yourself carefully for any tell-tale reddish blotch, every inch of skin exposed by your clothes, and scrub yourself harder than is comfortable in the shower, just to be sure.
The rust eats everything.
E. Seneca is a freelance speculative fiction author of horror and dark fantasy. Some of her works include "Harvesters" and "Cecilia" published in Grimmer & Grimmer Books' anthologies DeadSteam and DeadSteam II, "Glut" published by Sliced Up Press in their Slashertorte anthology, "Blood of the Sea" published in Issue #1 of The Deeps magazine, and "The Compound" published in Issue #1 of Astral: Alien Fiction magazine. She has written original fiction since 2008, and can be found on Twitter @esenecaauthor