Exit Kingdom

There’s sand in his hair, and his fingernails are torn and blue.
    She looks around again. Then she raises her foot and pokes the man’s back with her toe. Nothing happens so she pokes him again, harder.
    That’s when he starts squirming.
    There are muffled sounds coming from his throat, strained grunts and growls – frustration and pathosrather than suffering or pain. His arms begin to sweep the sand as if to make an angel.
And there’s a writhing, rippling movement that goes through the muscles of his body, as of a broken toy twitching with mechanical repetition, unable to right itself.
    Meatskin, she says aloud.
    One of the hands catches at her ankle, but she kicks it off.
    She sits down beside him, leans back on herhands and braces her feet up against the torso and pushes so that the body flips over face up, leaving a crooked, wet indentation in the sand.
    One arm is still flailing, but the other is caught under his back so she stays on that side of him and kneels over his exposed face.
    The jaw is missing altogether, along with one of the eyes. The face is blistered black and torn. A flap of skinon the cheekbone is pulled back and pasted with wet sand, revealing the
yellow-white of bone and cartilage underneath. The place where the eye was is now a mushy soup of thick, clear fluid mixed with blood, like ketchup eggs. There’s a string of kelp sticking out
of the nose that makes him look almost comical – as though someone has played a practical joke on him.
    But the rightness ofhis face is distorted by the missing mandible. Even revolting things can be made to look whole if there is a symmetry to them but with the jaw gone, the face looks squat and
the neck looks absurdly equine.
    She moves her fingers back and forth before his one good eye, and the eye rolls around in its socket trying to follow the movement but stuttering in its focus. Then she puts her fingersdown
where the mouth would be. He has a set of upper teeth, cracked and brittle, but nothing beneath to bite down against. When she puts her fingers there, she can see the tendons tucked in behind his
teeth clicking away in a radial pattern. There are milky white bones jutting out where the mandible would be attached and yellow ligaments like rubber bands stretching and relaxing, stretchingand
relaxing, with the ghost motion of chewing.
    What you gonna do? she says. Bite me? I think your biting days are gone away, mister.
    She takes her hand away from his face and sits back, looking at him.
    He gets his head shifted in her direction and keeps squirming.
    Stop fightin against yourself, she says. Your back’s broke. You ain’t going nowhere. This is just about the endof your days.
    She sighs and casts a gaze over the rocky shoal in the distance, the wide flat mainland beyond.
    What’d you come here for anyway, meatskin? she says. Did you smell some girlblood carried on the wind? Did you just have to have some? I know you didn’t swim here. Too slow and
stupid for that.
    There is a gurgle in his throat and a blue crab bursts out from the sandy exposedend of the windpipe and scurries away.
    You know what I think? she says. I think you tried to climb across those rocks. And I think you got picked up by those waves and got bust apart pretty good. That’s what I think. What do
you say about that?
    He has worked the arm free from underneath him and reaches towards her. But the fingers fall short by inches and dig furrows in the sand.
    Well, she says, you shoulda been here last night. There was a moon so big you could just about reach up and pluck it out of the sky. And these fish, all electric like, buzzing in circles round
my ankles. It was something else, mister. I’m telling you, a miracle if ever there was one.
    She looks at the rolling eye and the shuddering torso.
    Maybe you ain’t so interested in miracles. Butstill and all, you can cherish a miracle without
deserving
one. We’re all of us beholden to the beauty of the world, even the
bad ones of us. Maybe the bad ones most of all.
    She sighs, deep and long.
    Anyway, she says, I guess you heard enough of my palaver. Listen to me, I’m doin enough jawing for the both of us. Enough
jawing
for the both of us – get it?
    She laughs at her joke,and her laughter trails off as she stands and brushes the sand off her palms and looks out over the water to the mainland. Then she walks up to a stand of palm trees
above the beach and looks in the grassy undergrowth, stomping around with