The Death God's Way

This appeared in a 2023 anthology.

Morning Pages: October 9th. Sands Beach. California.

The beach feels off, like it holds its breath until I look away. Yet everything behaves normally. White sand, empty volleyball nets, tranquil waves, and—

Lauren Marie Basch, the lone person on a stretch of weekday beach, exchanges pen for phone, and trains its camera on the nearby sand dunes. Her grim expression doesn’t fluctuate, but when reaching for her journal again, she does so with trembling hands.

Either my imagination is still processing Tulum, or I’ve tempted it by returning to a beach, and now it has come for me.

***

Morning Pages: September 4th. Tulum.

The sea is an aqua goddess, an intemperate ruler of the shore’s shape and beauty. She berates and caresses the luscious white sand that protects the land from her encroachment.

I’m stretched out on a lounger on the deck of my bungalow, serenaded by waves and the rustling of mangroves and palm trees as I fill my morning pages with poetic gibberish.

Joggers jog, body surfers surf, pelicans dive-bomb the water. I spy cruise ships en route to Cancun, and the bobbing triangles of sailboats. I’m in a place people dream of running off to, discarding their big-city miseries and hard winters for endless warmth and beauty.

The function of morning pages is to transfer thoughts onto paper in order to clear my head, but they’ve become my journal while I finish my first book. So far, I’ve enjoyed the practice—it’s the only damn thing untainted by Doug. Smug Doug.

Ooh, I spy with my little eyes a crowd gathering halfway between me and the shoreline. They’re close enough to observe, yet far enough that I won’t subject them to my crappy Espanol.

Some carry shovels, others armfuls of seaweed or buckets. They divide work between diggers who toss sand into a pile, another group shaping it into a base, and those who unravel the seaweed. Tasks are performed in a synchronous movement, a mystical ritual set to the music of the shore. A sure sign that I must nurture my creativity!

The Artist’s Way says the essence of creativity is a—BRB with the exact quote.

Lauren uses a flip-flop to scoot her copy of The Artist’s Way closer, then fans through dog-eared pages until she locates the quote.

“The heart of creativity is an experience of the mystical union; the heart of the mystical union is an experience of creativity.” This reminds me of the Ouroboros, the serpent eating its own tail. We concurrently feed and eat our own creations, don’t we? Even academics livening up their nonfiction can embrace this magic. I need magic! Yesterday I boarded a flight knowing the time until tenure evaluation was ticking away, and if I didn’t finish this book soon, I’d better prepare myself to teach comparative religion to junior college numbskulls for the rest of my life.

The working title, “Mayan Death Gods: The History & Dialectic on Creation Counteractions,” is stinking academic nonsense, but I can’t find a better one.

I need to stop telling myself I can’t.

Let’s start with my three degrees and finish with my wise decision to end a toxic relationship with a screenwriter who pestered me with moronic ideas for a screenplay universe he’d write featuring Mayan Gods, for which I’d be expected to lend academic credibility in various pitch rooms. Insert the No buzzer here. Also, why do I write about leaving him when he had an affair with one of my students, so, technically, left me?

I need coffee for the rum. Drunk but awake is today’s goal. BRB.

***

Back. In less than five minutes, the sand people have constructed a shape about the size of a compact car. Musicians have also joined the group! Drums, percussive instruments, two young women play guitars. Everyone is singing! I count about 20 people, everyone wearing shades of red—from shirts to dresses to scarves. Interesting.

Pausing pages to take a few snaps. BRB.

***

Well. The builders didn’t want pictures, either outright or as the background for my selfies. Nor will they discuss their project. Now I’m the pariah tourist, and every person in the group has thrown a dirty look my way. Screw them! I rented this bungalow. They can’t keep me from watching.

Lauren’s pen rolls into the journal’s spine. She sips her rum-coffee. Wonders if the 120-proof will join forces with the muscle relaxers she took on the plane and kill her while she sleeps. Tells herself it’s a ludicrous notion.

Still, her brain drifts into dark territory, to the awful scene last week when she entered her office at a time she wasn’t supposed to be there and saw the entwined bodies on her desk. Their startled reaction to her outcry. Ensuing awkward minutes in which she struggled to stop herself from a stabbing rampage as Post-its® were peeled from sweaty flesh, clothes zipped and buttoned, and items swept off in a fit of passion were placed back on the desk.

She stifles a sob with a last chug of rum-coffee. Picks up her pen.

The length of whatever they’re building brings me back to the chapter I’m outlining on Zipacna, a reptilian demon who created the earth’s crust and its mountains. Ironically, his twin brother Cabrakan was the god of earthquakes. This must have driven Zipacna nuts. Chapter subtitle idea: “Demonic Mountain Maker vs Demonic Mountain Breaker.” That which we build, we also destroy.

Ooh! New book title idea: “Mayan Death Gods: The Good, The Bad, The Underworld.” Better but glib. God, I’m tired. Must be the rum.

Lauren’s notebook and pen clatter to the deck as she falls asleep. By sunset, the builders have finished and departed, leaving behind the fruit of their labor, a thing big enough to eclipse the watery horizon.

***

Morning Pages: September 5th. Tulum.

When I opened my eyes this morning, there was a gigantic sand sculpture of a Mayan God 40 feet off my porch. I paid extra for an unobstructed beach view, and if I wasn’t such a Mayan nerd, this might have been upsetting. But it’s magnificent! I circled its perimeter, figuring it to be about 8 feet high, 30 feet long, and 12 feet wide. I’m surprised the high tide didn’t diminish the sea-facing side.

The most spectacular element is the Mayan headdress, elaborately sculpted with seaweed strands threaded around shells. I’m sure there’s a better view from an overhead angle. But how do I get above it?

Luck must have heard my call, because down the way, I see a worker on a ladder trimming a palm tree. BRB.

***

The worker and his son agreed to rent me their 12-foot step ladder for 10 bucks! Now this badass associate professor can smell tenure, and it smells like a library and job security, which also smells like a library. I’d pat myself on the back, except I’ve got my Nikon D850 in hand. Here I go!

Lauren hangs the camera around her neck, kicks off her flip-flops and drags the ladder across the beach, unfolding it close to the humongous sand feet. With additional height and the wide-angle lens, she’ll get a perfect shot of the entire sculpture.

With each step up, she bounces to anchor the legs into the sand. She won’t make it to the top—only an acrobat would aim for the top—but she’ll shoot for the eighth rung.

She waves at the workers standing a hundred yards off and mouths a “fuck you” to the stubborn old man who’d rejected an extra 20 dollars to hold the ladder for her.

“Okay, Lauren, do it for the book, do it for the tenure.” Two more brave steps up to the seventh rung and she pauses, comforted by the aluminum pressing against her shins. Then a final step, muscles straining as she keeps balance.

Frisson zips through her as she beholds this amazing shot. The noon sun means no shadows to contend with. She mustn’t let this excitement overwhelm her into carelessness, though.

Once composed, she raises the Nikon and takes her first shot.

He's a deity, though she doesn’t recognize him. His arms are pressed to his sides and his legs are together. The feet have sculpted toenails even! He wears the sand sculpture version of an Ex loincloth, embellished with real feathers. The Ex covers his pronounced phallus, flaccid yet engorged. She center-frames on it, which, smooth and without detail, is more of an absurdly obvious suggestion than outright pornography. The mighty half-bone suggests ‘fertility deity.’ Lauren chuckles until she’s dizzy.

“Uh oh.” She steadies herself, keeps her brain on factoids and close-up shots. The Mayan civilization abutted the rim of the asteroid crater responsible for killing the dinosaurs, a position no doubt informing their ethos. She’ll work that in somewhere.

One last picture of the intricately crafted face—a perfect book cover photo, she decides, stunned by the incredible fortuity of an associate professor of Mayan Civilization and Comparative Religions winding up in the Yucatán with a Mayan god sandcastle outside her bungalow.

A sudden coldness infiltrates her good mood, fast as a deployed button. Now she’s an icicle.

Next, a dire feeling of precognition. Something is about to happen.

And she's being watched.

Not by the workers. They’re too far off.

Gina focuses on the Sandman’s eyes, which she realizes with a jolt have dead crabs standing in for eyeballs.

Her anxiety crescendos into the palpable movement of sand rumbling below her, creating an energy that snakes up the ladder and shakes it with invisible hands.

She lets go of the camera. Its leather straps send it banging against her chest as she stretches her arms out for balance. Her ankles pitch against the rungs and Lauren folds, clutching the top rung and hoping the camera stays intact as it smacks into the aluminum.

Muttering to herself, she slowly unfolds to an upright position.

“Okay—”

A violent upheaval dislodges the ladder and Lauren. The world spins around her until she makes a hard landing between the sandman’s feet.

Lauren lays still, regaining her breath and processing what just happened. The sand beneath her is harder than imagined, but when she tries rolling onto her side, it gives way like an hourglass. The feet are over seven feet high, so, if the sculpture were to cave in, she’d suffocate.

Abs groaning, she raises her torso into a seated position and sinks a foot deeper. She can’t see over the sand toes.

“Help! Somebody! Please! I’m stuck! Somebody?”

If the tree trimmers can’t hear her cries, they must have at least seen her fall. But after a few minutes of yelling, nobody comes to help. Every outcry drops her inches deeper until the sand is at shoulder-level.

She glances up at the wall of sand looming above, and takes slow, measured breaths to minimize lung expansion. More time passes. The sun dips below the feet. It finally dawns on her that no help will arrive, and she can either sink to her death or dig like a crazy person in a race between freedom and suffocation.

Another ground tremor sends the crest of sand crashing over her head. Lauren shuts her eyes, gulps her last breath and is buried.

In the dark interior, Lauren’s dread gives way to morbid acquiescence. This is it. Ironic death. If instinct kicks in, if she tries to breathe, she’ll die and embalm herself in one fell swoop. The world will ignore her insightful articles, or her many students charging into fields of intellectual pursuit. Her loving family won’t matter, either. No, Lauren’s legacy will reduce to a creepy footnote: the professor who drowned in sand. Will Doug the slug cry for her? Or will he write a mediocre screenplay about it?

Goddamn no, he won’t. Lauren claws at the sand walls; her feet kick and press down in search of solid ground. But she’s running out of time. Her lungs deflate. Brain cells pop into extinction. One more pfft and she’s gone.

Then her finger breeches the sand! Lauren peeks through her lashes, spots the pinprick of light, and bulldozes forward in what is either a burst of adrenaline or death throes. Her foot finds the bottom and provides the impetus to launch forward until she bursts out through the ankle.

Dropping onto her hands and knees, she gasps, retches, spits, and blinks sand from her eyes. Oxygen, oh sweet oxygen, fills her lungs. She collapses onto her back. Calmer now. Oh, the ladder is gone. Those bastards retrieved their ladder but left her to die.

The camera is still around her neck. She shakes it, crestfallen by all the sand pouring out. Those pictures are the only ones in existence. They must be recoverable. And, if so, this brush with death will make a fabulous addition to the book tour. “How I almost died getting the pictures.”

Her gaze shifts back to the Sandman, to the gap in its foot, her tunnel of escape, now imploded. Was it a mere hour ago she considered its existence with a mixture of curiosity and delight? Now it radiates sepulchral vibrations—enough to sprout goosebumps all over her body. A baby tremor tickles her backside, hitching her body a few inches toward the feet, which is all the spooky she needs to scrabble to her feet and haul ass to the bungalow, assuring herself it wasn’t trying to reel her back. No, it was just the shock after a near-death experience.

***

Morning Pages: September 6th. Tulum.

The waves were so loud, I thought they were breaking against the bungalow. My eyes opened to the dark room. It took a sec to remember where I was—Tulum. Alone, always and forever alone.

The digital clock said it was 3:43 am. The bungalow’s sheer curtains were closed, so the view was hazy, except for the brightness of a low moon. As my senses sharpened, I realized it wasn’t the waves that woke me, but a drum beat. Several drums. Escape would be difficult since my body was stuck in the fetal position. And the drums were definitely getting louder, meaning closer.

Under the drums I heard the swishing noises of bare feet shuffling across the sandy deck. Shadows billowed across my walls. I recognized the shape of headdresses. Sure that an invisible entity would break in, I sat up. Then, for some dumb reason, I went to open the doors.

A reek of dead fish greeted me.

Featureless shadows inside red clothes stood in a semicircle around me. Their mouths dropped open, expelling cobras that rose above their heads, where, back-lit by the moon, they became hissing silhouettes. In sync with the drums, the shadows stepped forward in unison. My vision narrowed, pixelating with the red of their garments.

Then an enormous shape rose from the beach and its shadow engulfed us all.

Loud bells woke me up. The landline in the kitchen was ringing. A message from the travel site informed me that a hurricane watch I didn’t know existed had been upgraded to an official hurricane warning. They expected it would go east into the Atlantic or west across Belize and miss us altogether. However, I should be ready to leave at a half hours’ notice.

I write this after hanging up. Yesterday’s incident provoked such fear, I’m relieved to end this vacation early, even if I don’t get to see the Ruins.

Pressed on the bed under a tonnage of gloom, Lauren torments herself further with the idea of another person kissing Doug’s skin, crisp and sweet with woody notes. Why did she keep picking at this scab?

With effort, Lauren let kinder memories fill her.

...Sunday mornings in bed with crossword puzzles, living a cliche and loving every bit of it.

...Nights when they tried new recipes that one or the other would screw up via improvisation, and they’d laugh and wind up with wine and pizza.

...When Doug would run a story idea by her, and the ensuing elation of building a story together, of pressing deeper into their imaginations, challenging the other to lift it further or weirder.

...Picking out a Christmas tree.

...The most romantic kiss under the waterfall.

...Shooting stars on their camping trip in the Rockies.

...Hours spent running fingers across each other’s back.

...]Horace, the sweet senior dog Doug brought home after watching a local news segment on him.

...Those intimate, knowing looks Doug would beam at her across a room full of people, making Lauren feel so special to be chosen by this unicorn of a man.

Now she'd die alone in a hurricane. A fine metaphor for her failings. A type-A professor with a stick up her ass who can’t forgive or understand why someone without economic power and limited success in their chosen field would find the admiring eyes of another so intoxicating and worth the risk.

Demented, infantile tears wet her pillows. Lauren indulges a while, giving no shits if the storm carries her out to sea. When she's done crying, being a sensible woman, she acknowledges Doug's failure as a screenwriter won't excuse his betrayal. That’s some real codependent bullshit. All the gauzy, romanticized memories conveniently excised drunken nights of raging insecurity when one of his screenplays got rejected or ignored. Or how he used Horace to passive-aggressively chip away at her, explaining that the dog could sense her emotional frigidity.

The most haunting image again strobes behind her eyes: Doug pressing down on the student assistant in Lauren’s office on Lauren’s desk. A sin as great as fucking someone in their bed.

Lauren grabs her journal. Committing some of these vulnerable thoughts to paper might bolster chapters on Ix Chel, the goddess of love, fertility and death. With that thought, emotionally frigid Lauren takes her journal outside despite a hurricane warning.

The weather doesn’t seem hurricane adjacent in the least.

Yesterday’s accident must have magnified the sandman’s significance for me because today it appears larger and closer. I can’t stop staring at the gap in its foot where I might have been entombed. When I turn my head away from it, my peripheral vision plays tricks on me in the subtle rise and fall of its chest—which is ridiculous. There are no lungs. It doesn’t need to breathe.

As a secular humanist, I’ve resisted belief in the spiritual origins of humankind, preferring an empirical analysis of history. I love knowing how civilizations worship, but don’t share any of their theism. Attempts to discover some cosmological spiritual truth is time wasted on unanswerable questions.

So whenever I hear about people grappling with the paranormal, I find out they’re believers. Ergo, only believers are afflicted. Ergo, to believe is to open yourself to those beliefs. Therefore, I choose not to believe.

Brave words, but despite my empiricism, I have no explanation for this feeling that something wants to consume me.

Oh! People! A young couple in matching lime green trail sandals jogs along the beach. Newlyweds, no doubt. Yay for them. Wait until he fucks one of your friends, or colleagues.

They stop in front of the sandman. He points to the bulging phallus and says “Cheese” as she snaps his picture. Then she poses with her hand positioned as if touching it—like the tourist photos of people holding up the Tower of Pisa.

Crap. They spotted me. They’ll want me to…yep. To be continued.

***

I’m back. My eyes kept drifting over to the crumbled feet, the scene of my near-annihilation, but didn’t linger, preferring to focus on the iPhones handed to me. The couple, college sweethearts married in Cleveland two days ago, posed with his hand around her waist, prom photo style. I took shots with both cameras, then relayed the hurricane warning, to which they shrugged, because their world is a shining fucking pearl.

I waved goodbye, my apprehension dissipating until I got to the deck and saw the red scarf caught on the table’s leg and my belief system imploded. Now I remembered the significance of red is aligned with blood sacrifice. Blood, blood, blood, the life force, the chu 'lel. Were those sandman builders sorcerers? Did I upset them by asking to take their pictures? Or observing them work? Saner rationalizations flew by until I plucked one to use: someone lost the scarf to the wind. Nevermind the red. I’m so silly. LOL. Shush, Lauren. Put your bags by the door.

***

WTF. After I got my luggage together, I peeked out to check the weather and a few things were very wrong! The feet bore no traces of my incursion. Worse, the thing was a stone's throw away from my stairs, meaning it moved! Even worse, two pairs of lime green trail sandals were discarded next to it.

Now I’m sitting on the bed, trying to talk myself out of crazy ideas. Where is the couple? Why did they leave their sandals? Why aren’t the travel people in touch? Where are my neighbors? Will someone send a van from the airport? BRB.

***

Outside, a tempest shrieks through the mangroves and palms. Both the landline and my cell phone are dead. I’m so puzzled as to why the couple left behind their sandals. I know this is insane, but I have to at least glance outside. Here goes.

***

Holy fuck. The thing is at the stairs, on its belly, with its head turned as if watching the bungalow. Not the worst of it, though. HUMAN FEET ARE STICKING OUT OF THE THING'S BACK. I recognized the bride’s blue toenail polish. I have to

***

I panicked, banged on the walls, yelled for the neighbors. No response. No taxis to hail. No bikes or cars to rent. No people around. I guess I’ll

At the wail of distant sirens, Lauren closes the journal, assuming this is the half-hour warning, and walks over to her luggage, tucks the notebook inside, debates about whether she should pee before leaving. No. She must leave now. But how? Exiting out the only door takes her onto the deck and too damn close to the sandman. She pictures herself making a quick exit and instead of walking around the sandman, she hops over the railing to the right of the front door. It's not a big drop.

Too late.

The bungalow’s floors ripple. A booming sound rattles the walls.

“Oh God.”

A shadow falls over the bungalow, blotting out what is left of the sun. Then the colossus steps onto her deck with a boom. Lauren abandons her luggage, backing away as a maelstrom of airborne sand clods assault the windows. Each crash is heavier than the last.

Is this a hurricane? Or is the creature kicking the bungalow?

A man’s disembodied head bashes against the glass door, his features crush flat behind the spider-webbing fractures.

She recognizes the groom’s buzz-cut hair.

Before the shock fully registers, here comes the bride! Her head breaks clear through the weakened glass. Lauren cowers, covering her eyes as glass shards slash red ribbons on her arms. She wobbles around blindly and trips over the head. Her body crunches onto glass as she lands face-to-face with the bride, whose expression is frozen in a rictus of terror.

Sand knees thunder onto the deck. The monster peers through the ruined doors.

Paralyzed, Lauren gawks at the dead crabs staring back at her. A mammoth sand hand punches inside, reaching for her. Sharp granules further lacerate her skin as Lauren rolls out of its path. The gale is so loud, she’s unsure if it’s the monster bellowing or herself or the hurricane.

The window over the sink is her only way out. She staggers to her feet and runs to the kitchen. Drags one of the bistro chairs to the sink and hops up. Behind her, wood snaps, floors squeal, the bungalow quakes.

Covering her eyes, she kicks through the window—wind, rain and glass whoosh in, sending Lauren teetering to the edge of the counter. She catches the edge of a curtain, but the rod quickly detaches from the wall and she tips back, hands flailing until she finds a knob on the cupboard and holds it tight. Her weight pulls the hinges away from the wood.

Sandman fists drum beat the roof. Pieces of ceiling rupture. Any second now, the roof will collide with the floors.

Just as the knob gives, Lauren seizes the cabinet’s edge, fingers scrabbling for the wood shelf divider. Holding on for dear life, or at least until she gets a solid footing. Lauren then hurtles herself through the broken window—just as the bungalow collapses in a deafening explosion.

***

Time passes. An hour? Five minutes? Howls of wind and displaced gods transition into noises of civilization. Sirens…voices…car alarms.

Lauren rises from the mangrove bush, rabbit eyes peering through a sheet of blood.

No sight is more terrible than the flattened bungalow beneath a hillock of sand.

Wait. There is something worse. Much worse.

On top of it all, arranged like grotesque wedding cake toppers, are the honeymooners’ bodies—one headless, one head-squashed.

***

Morning Pages: October 9th. Sands Beach. California.

You are still healing, dear Lauren, so keep your eyes on the prize! Stop picturing the poor dead honeymooners any time you experience an inkling of healing or happiness. Whatever the hell happened was not your fault!

The Artist’s Way says if you’re in pain and the future terrifies you and the past hurts, you’re supposed to pay attention to right now. Okay. Right now, I have a pretty good title: “Stalked by a Mayan Death God.”

If people want to judge the book as a figurative recounting of my nervous breakdown, fine. If it implies a low-budget exploitation film, who cares? It’ll attract non-academic readers who’ve come for the thrilling horror of it all and wind up learning about an important civilization. Snotty academics can sneer, but it’ll fly off the shelves. And there’s nothing department chairs covet more than book sales.

I can smell the musty library, and it smells like victory.

Lauren’s gaze sweeps from the parking lot—empty except for her car—to the modest waves and a flock of sandpipers skittering along the shore. The combination of a cool ocean breeze and warm sunshine fills her with a shivery joy, and she wants to burrow into this moment, make it last. She is alone. But alive. Alone is okay. She can be happy again.

The bliss fizzles fast. Lauren senses the squeeze of a primal trigger. The beach’s delights are forgeries. Waves, too loud. Sandpipers, greedy primeval predators.

The beach feels off, like it holds its breath until I look away. Yet everything behaves normally. White sand, empty volleyball nets, tranquil waves, and—

Lauren exchanges pen for phone and zooms in on the nearby sand dunes. Then she picks up her pen again with trembling hands.

Either my imagination is still processing Tulum, or I’ve tempted it by returning to a beach, and now it has come for me.

The perfume of salt and sand has transformed into a familiar putrefaction. How could it have followed me three thousand miles west?

All my beliefs were wrong. I swear I hear those drums from my dreams.

Am I still dreaming?

There’s nobody around to help me and I can’t move, except to put pen to paper.

Seagulls coast overhead. I envy their wings.

It’s closing in—on its back, face to the sun. I see the literal locomotion, as if a zillion ants ferry it on their backs.

The head turns toward me.

Dead crab eyes.

It has a mouth now.

In seconds, it—