Short Story "The Seagulls" By BJA Samuel

A short story by BJA Samuel. “The Seagulls” is a dark, atmospheric meditation on loss, memory, and the fragility of meaning.

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Content Warning

This story contains disturbing imagery and themes, including violence and graphic descriptions of the human body. It may not be suitable for all readers. Reader discretion is advised. The Seagulls

The house stood in isolation, a short walk from the edge of the cliff.  It had the utilitarian look of a building made in the 70’s.  It had a flat roof and wood panels like a school or office.  The paintwork was peeling, and the wood was warped and split; the tattered fragments rippled in the wind like dried seaweed.  Salt encrusted the buildings' extremities.  Bird shit covered the roof in abstract chalky splatters.  The glass frontage was entirely obscured.  The windows were cloudy and opaque with seagull excrement.  Gulls nested amongst the air vents and aerials and carried out their clannish querulous meetings across the roof.  They bred there amongst the fishy smells, the broken eggshells and the loose feathers.  

By night, a faint light could be discerned from behind the chalky veil of the glass windows. UV light would spill through glass and cast faint shadows around the house, blue flickers of movement like some bizarre shadow puppetry, indiscernible motions of beings carrying on their esoteric habits behind the chalky glass.  

A single road approached from the north.  The potholed and eroded asphalt stretched in a thin, sinuous line that diminished across the tidal plane and disappeared amongst the sand dunes.  The dark rippled sand of the flood plain surrounded the road.  The tide cut off the building for hours a day from the mainland.  The house and road were surrounded on all sides by the sea or by the dark sand.

The man and the woman sat alone in the kitchen.  The man smiled at the woman with an affection that can only come with familiarity.  The long-held affection of a man and a woman at ease with one another through a long and eventful life together.  The couple, having come to an understanding over time that the past is the past and the future together is all that they have left.  The woman, an elegant and attractive woman of 50 plus years, sat reading by the lime white glass window and the man watched her as he cooked a dinner. The two of them drank large glasses of wine, and the air filled with the scent of oil, garlic, and herbs.  

“You want me to add a little anchovy to yours, darling?” the man said in a nonchalant manner, barely looking up from his frying pan as he waited for the answer.  The woman thought for a moment, her eyes drifting away from her book and towards the blank white windows.  The wind beyond the pane pushed loudly against it, and the glass contracted in its frame, disturbing the internal pressure of the kitchen for a moment.

“Yes, please,” the woman said, returning to her book.  The man looked up suddenly from his pan. The affection in his face diminished instantly, and his face grew dark as his brow furrowed and his lips thinned in annoyance.  The woman continued to read, turning the pages with a delicate flick of her fingers.  The man removed his pan from the heat.  He hung his head for a moment in disappointment.  His trembling hands reached to his forehead, and he massaged his temples, his body doubled over as though his energy had waned and he no longer possessed the power to continue.  The air filled with the acrid tang of crisping herbs and burned garlic as the contents of the pan continued to cook.  The man stumbled around the kitchen units towards the woman, unable to look at her as he came forward.  His expression was more of annoyance than anger; a kind of world-weary exhaustion had overcome him as he came up behind her.  The woman did not look up as the man passed a knife across her neck.  The man slid the knife from one side to the other in one deft practised motion, and the neck opened up like a smile.  Her neck sagged open, and from the opening a strange grey gruel bubbled forth.  The grey sludge boiled over the top of the neck opening and spread in a thick flow down her front and onto her legs, and then was followed by a viscous blood-like liquid.  Large bubbles formed and then burst loudly in the gruel as it trickled across the woman’s lap in a seemingly endless tide.  The man watched in disappointed silence as the woman slowed and the gruel seeped out of her neck.  Then, as she slumped over, he stepped past her and walked towards a door at the back of the kitchen. The door was marked with a sign that read ‘do not enter’, but the man entered anyway, having written the note himself.  He entered the room on the other side and closed the door on the dead woman in the kitchen.  The air was cold and frosty, and he reached for a line of coats on the wall by the side of the door.  A cold hung in the air and rolled in eddies as he moved through it.  He pulled on a large, thick coat of suede and fur and tightened it around his body, sealing it with the button.  Clouds of ice filled the air as he pulled on the coat, tiny crystals that had formed on the surface of it.  He batted them away with his hand as though waving away an annoying fly.  The cool dark space in which he now stood had the antiseptic smell of a hospital or abattoir.  He lumbered down a small flight of steps like a truculent bear and along a metal gantry and into a large refrigerated room lit by UV strip lights from above.  The walls and tables of the room were covered in thick, compacted ice.  In rows before him were metal boxes all neatly labelled and filled in order of size.  Each box contained piles of body parts of varying size and function. Hands, fingers, thighs, fingernails, knees, elbows, eyes.  The body parts lay in multitudinous mounds piled high in each box, fleshy, pale and flaccid, like lost parts of alabaster statues catalogued in boxes.  The etiolated pieces of disparate body parts await animation beyond their fleshy, impotent state.  He continued past these boxes, past the brains and the lungs and the toes, past the craniums and noses and vaginas, the hair and the buttocks, towards his laboratory.  There he sat at his desk and passed his discerning eye over his notes.  The sad, bloodshot eyes hung loosely now, older and more jaded.  He wrote notes in his exact and neat hand, then he closed his eyes and pondered the question at hand.  Jane did not like anchovies.  So why did the copy?  He had reconstructed her from the ground up.  He had painstakingly built her from the body parts.  They were an exact copy.  Her experiences had been inserted from her Pneumacore memory stick, taken from her at the moment of her death.  So why did he keep failing?  There was only one thing to do.  Start again.

Over the coming month, he reconstructed Jane again.  He built her piece-by-piece from her toes to the top of her head.  He painstakingly attached her toenails to her toes, her legs to her torso, her fingers to her palm.  Every individual hair had to be sewn directly into the scalp; any mistake and she would be imperfect.  He had to grow moles and blemishes in petri dishes and cross-reference them from photographs he had of her when she was alive. The mole had to be exactly the same size and shape or he would have to begin again. Once the moles were grown, he would attach each one to the right place on her body, sewing in any hairs that grew there, then move onto the next one.  

The pale skin on the reconstructed body was cold to the touch, like meat on a butcher’s block.  At first, the feeling of the cold, dead flesh disturbed him, but as the body accrued its humanity, would return and he would look forward to finishing her.  He always left the face and eyes to last, as they were always the hardest parts to get right.  It was at that stage that he had made the most mistakes.  Despite the many times he had recreated Jane, it was still a strange shock to see her face appearing from the featureless dead flesh.  At first, the face would seem to lack any resemblance but as he applied the hair and inserted the eyes Jane’s face would appear more and to him from the nothingness.  Jane would suddenly seem to inhabit the dead flesh in front of him.  The wan porcelain skin, though dead, would suddenly seem more than meat.  More than stitched together parts and more than the woman he loved.  Her visage would inhabit the flesh like a ghost re-finding its home.  Her revenant soul home again.  He would work on her features until all feelings of revulsion had gone.  

The last thing he did was to insert the Pneumacore memory stick into the dead brain stem. The memories would then flood into the empty brain cells, filling them with Jane’s memories, returning her to her form.  The very last thing he did was to blow air into her lungs.  This part always filled him with the most dread, the last moment of solitude.  The moment he would find out if he had at last been successful, months of work, up in smoke or his one final attempt to recreate his wife from the genetic scaffolding he had amassed.  Many times, he had tried and failed.  Sometimes it was the physical appearance he wasn’t happy with.  Others, it was her personality.  Each time he altered something, he wanted to get her closer to his memory of her.  If it wasn’t perfection, it wasn’t Jane, and he would have to begin again.  He had restarted many times.  He had murdered Jane many times.  The recreations had disappointed him more times than he could count.  At first, it had upset him to kill her, but now it had become a sort of upsetting but necessary routine.

The first time he had remade her, he had noticed the mistakes straight away.  As soon as she came back to him, he saw the mole slightly too high on her cheek.  He had wept as he embraced her, kissing her lips and holding her close to him.  But even as he wept, he saw the mole maybe a centimetre too high on her cheek and the wrong colour.  Why is it that he would only notice such things after the reanimation?  Then, as the hours ticked by, he had noticed that her gait was a little off.  Perhaps he had attached the hipbone at the wrong angle, or her spine was slightly too curved at the top?  Either way, the way she walked was not how he remembered her.  But he dared not begin again.  He was so happy to have her back that he did not have the heart to destroy her.  Then, as a week went by, he noticed the way that she pronounced ‘seagull’ was wrong.  Jane had always said it a little wrongly, “Sea’ll”, but this recreation said it correctly.  Then there was the slight discrepancy of the recreation's upper lip.  Jane had a pale scar, perhaps 2 mm long, just above the top of her lip.  Jane had caught it on a bramble when she was young.  The recreation didn’t have it.  He kicked himself for forgetting it.  At night, as the recreation slept, he would stare at her, wondering why this stranger was in his bed, this scarless woman who seemed not to resemble his wife in any way.  It was a month before he summoned up the courage to accept that he needed to start again.  With tears streaming down his face, he had killed the recreation and disposed of her, the first of many poor reconstructions.  Mistakes.  At first, they would strongly resemble his dead wife.  But after a week or sometimes longer, they seemed in no way like his beloved wife.  They seemed like impostors.  Like strangers invading his home, insulting the memory of his beloved wife.  

The last recreation had been with him the longest.  She had pleased him in almost every way.  She had resembled Jane almost perfectly.  But why had she asked him to add anchovies to the pasta?  He knew right then that he had to begin again.  This one, though, would be perfect.  Every time he had destroyed a recreation, he had made notes on his reasons.  He had filled a thick-paged book with every note on every imperfection, and each time he remade her, he went through each note and put right what he had failed to do right before.  Every time she had been recreated, she was a little more perfect than the last time. One area he had particularly struggled with was her sexuality.  Jane had a very specific sexuality that had been extremely hard to recreate.  She had had an unusual upbringing and had had an experience when she was young that she had been unable to talk to him about. As he didn’t know what it was, it was hard to configure her sexuality to conform to his memory of her.  She was particularly submissive during intercourse.  The recreations, although submissive, were submissive in a different way than Jane.  Each time, he had been put off by their behaviour.  Although he had enjoyed the sex, the contact, and the physical act, by the time they had finished, he felt as though he had cheated on Jane, which made him angry towards the recreations.  He had killed them many times after having sex with them, realising that the feeling of guilt had come from their inability to be like Jane.  Many post-coital deaths had occurred in a fit of anger and guilt.  Once, he had strangled one of the recreations during sex, as it had occurred to him partway through that her behaviour did not resemble Jane at all.  The more recreations he made, the more he despised the ones that he had messed up.  The more he resented them for being a manifestation of his failure.  

The newest recreation was almost complete.  The Pneumacore memory stick was in place. He had sewn up the scalp to hide the entry port.  He gave one more glance at his notebook, and as he read the final suggestion, he realised that he had done everything he could to recreate his wife as he remembered her.  Each ‘Jane’ was the most perfect one yet.  Each one was more like her than the one before.  Had he achieved perfection?  There was only one way to find out.  He reached over and flipped the switch.  The slow pumping mechanism began to work, the lung-like rubber diaphragm contracted, and a metronomic rhythmic sound filled his studio.  He poured the Grasling Vermon paste (named after the scientists who had invented it) into the machine and watched as the machine oxygenated it.  Bubbles formed inside the grey fluid, and the Grasling Vermon paste resembled a thin sort of gruel inside the pumping mechanism.  The Grasling Vermon paste began to filter through the connecting pipe and into a second chamber.  Inside the chamber, the paste was mixed with some of the vital chemicals too dangerous for the average person to deal with. The machine mixed the proper amounts into the paste safely, and then, as the reaction started, it pumped it into the body of the subject.  He watched as the liquid rose through the tubes and into the recreation of Jane.  The grey gruel slid along the clear plastic tube as the rhythmic slurp and suck of the machine pulled it through the chambers and into the arm of the recreation.  Then the paste entered the body slowly at first, but then, with a sudden sucking motion, it shot down the tube and into the body almost as though it was hungry for it.  He checked the machine to make sure the Grasling Vermon paste had been fully absorbed and that none of it had remained in the chambers.  When he was satisfied, he stood for a moment watching the recreation.  It was perfect.  This time it would be perfect. He took a deep breath, then leaned over to Jane and placed his mouth over hers.  He blew into her body and watched her chest rise as he exhaled.  Her chest rose gently, and he watched her bosom rise and then fall.  The inanimate flesh became somewhat animate, but still it was only flesh.  He took a deep breath and then blew gently at first and then hard until he had expelled the air from his lungs.  Jane’s bosom rose and fell again, and then he watched closely, his breath expelling from her open mouth.  He watched closely, waiting.  As her chest fell down again, he waited still.  Then her chest rose suddenly of its own accord.  She took in a deep breath and began to breathe without him.  The kiss of life helped to restart the innate muscle memory of the flesh.  He watched her chest rise and fall in a steady rhythm.  Her cold lips open a little blush forming beneath the skin.  Her white skin was the perfect replication of Jane’s, the blemishes on her arm, the creases between the fingers and the liver spots on her hands were all places precisely where they always had been.  

Her breathing got stronger, and the more she breathed, the stronger it became.  He watched her skin change colour from white to pink.  The more she breathed, the closer to being Jane she became.  In time, he no longer saw an inanimate corpse lying on the medical table; he saw his wife coming back to him.  Although this process jaded him, this moment was always intensely poignant.  As he watched her come to life on the table, the memories of her death and funeral seemed to flood back to him; his confusion and grief overpowered him at the instant of her return.    

In an hour or two, she opened her eyes and was blinking slowly into consciousness.  He went over to his workstation and made some notes.  Then he made a pot of herbal tea, Jane’s favourite.  This was the first test.  Only a few had failed the first test.  This part of the test was perhaps the most nerve-racking.  He had put in so much effort that to fail as soon as she had awoken felt like a kick in the teeth.  As the water boiled, he watched the new Jane.  Lying perfectly still on the medical table.  She was naked and still unconscious when she opened her eyes. There was nothing there; the pupil was unresponsive and motionless.  The more life returned to her, the more he found he responded to her sexually.  The emotions he felt were a strange cocktail.  He had great feelings of guilt for the sensations he could not control.  Along with the fear and trepidation, there was also sadness and grief reawakened each and every time he watched her come to life.  But he had had to admit to himself the feelings of sexual desire and the compulsion to alleviate his loneliness, too. Before the redness came back to the skin, he would feel nothing for the wan, flaccid corpse lying on the medical table.  But as she breathed life into her body, he found his eyes lingering on her breasts, on her vagina and her lips and neck.  At first, the reawakening of his sexual desire for her had appalled him. The line between an inanimate corpse and a person whose innate sexuality aroused him was hard to fathom and to stomach, but familiarity with the process had rendered any reservations he had mute.  Now he found that the closer to life she became, the more he could indulge his desire for her.  The kettle boiled loudly, and he allowed his eyes to linger on the space between her legs.

The process of recreating the dead had been practised now for a decade or more, but had fallen out of fashion as the ability to recreate the lost one proved too difficult. Breakthroughs had made the process more efficient and effective.  The first recreations had not been given the ‘Pneumacore memory sticks’ and had only resembled the lost ones in physical appearance.  The recreations would look like the lost ones, but due to a lack of shared experience, had been unlike them in almost every way.  The experiences that made them who they were were missing.  Many bereaved family members, tempted to recreate their loved ones, found that they were living with a partner or child totally dissimilar to the person they remembered.  That, combined with a lack of shared memories, would often create a discrepancy that was impossible to live with.  The recreation would often leave and live a completely separate life to the original, develop different taste etc.  The bond the family shared simply did not exist without the memories.  It was then that it was suggested that the memories be implanted into the recreations.  The invention of the Pneumacore memory device was the breakthrough everyone had wanted.

There was also the problem of what age to recreate the dead.  Some recreated the lost one at the age of death, but often that person would be elderly, so the partner would die anyway, and the recreation would be left alone.  But if the bereaved picked a younger age, there would be a discrepancy in age, too.  Though the recreation companies didn’t like to admit it, often bereaved partners would choose to recreate their loved ones at a younger age so as to enjoy them in their physical peak and not in their dotage.  It was also harder to maintain a relationship between a 25-year-old and a 70-year-old.  

It was the Grasling Vermon paste that had made the reanimation of the dead tissue possible, a special cocktail.  The bodies were made up of de-cellurised genetic material grown in specialised factories.  The bodies were difficult to get right.  Each part was different, and each part was grown en masse de-cellurised.  Usually, the companies would rebuild from their enormous stores, but he had grown tired of their attempts and had decided to try alone to recreate her.

He had loved Jane for most of his life.  They had met in their 20’s, and he had instantly been attracted to her.  All through their lives together, they had enjoyed a healthy sex life and had enjoyed one another’s company, support and trust.  He had hardly been apart from her since getting married.  They had not had children for various reasons.  Then Jane had died age of 50.  He had been devastated.  A friend had mentioned the recreation service, and since then, he had spent all his money and time attempting to recreate his lost love.  10 years spent attempting to be with her again.  10 years of failure.  The water boiled in the kettle, and the switch clicked off.  He filled the cup with water and watched as the herbs tinctured the liquid to a clear green.  Jane’s eyes came into focus, and she looked over to him.  Her confused gaze and tired eyes focused on him, and there was a flicker of recognition.  She closed her eyes again, and her face screwed up as she sat upright.  He handed her the cup of tea.

“Thank you, dear”, she said, her voice guttural and strange.  He watched her with suspicion, watching her sip lightly from the cup, waiting for her reaction.  She dropped the cup, and it exploded onto the floor, the china shattering and the liquid fanning out in a wide area.  Her hands were shaking.  He hung his head, feeling the sensations of failure and disappointment rising in his body.  She was trembling like a newborn bird.  

“I’m sorry she said.  It burned my mouth.  It was so hot I wasn’t expecting it”.  Jane seemed confused and then suddenly became aware of her nudity.

“Oh, James!  I’m naked.  Can you get me a blanket or something?  What is happening?  Why am I in here?” She covered her breasts with her arms as he came towards her with a blanket.  He passed the blanket around her, leaving his arm across her shoulders to comfort her.  “Thank you, James.  I’m not sure what is going on.  Am I unwell?”  Jane rested her head against her knees, closing her eyes as if to rest her brain.  

“You’ve been unwell, darling.  But I have been trying to find a cure for you.  I think I have found it.  You have been in a coma for several years.  But I have tirelessly worked on a cure, and today I believe I have found it.”  He had said the lie many times.  So often that he was now unable to say it with any degree of spontaneity.  He could not even tell if it was in any way convincing or just words spoken without conviction, sounds muttered by his body that lacked any meaning.  Jane looked up and around her.  As she did so, he kicked the door to the storage room shut.  This recreation of Jane must not know that she was a recreation.  A few had realised.  Some had found the storeroom and seen the rows of boxes.  They had seen the body parts stacked and labelled.  He had to destroy them.  They could not be aware that they were a copy.  Jane was not a copy, and the knowledge that she was one ruined the illusion for him.

Jane slowly returned to him.  She focused on the world, her mind reengaged with it.  She stood from the table, and James guided her through the door and into the living quarters. He had disposed of the other Jane weeks ago.  He had thrown her flaccid body into the foaming waters below the house.  There she had turned in the white-tipped breakers and rolled against the jagged rocks.  He had watched with placid indifference as the corpse had shredded and disintegrated against the porous stone.  Like a loosely limbed manikin thrown into the breakers.  Crabs, barnacles and starfish had fed upon the organic matter that she shed into the roiling waters.  The Grasling Vermon paste had boiled in the hissing foam, staining the rocks and coating the sea life with viscous vermillion pigmentation that stained with vibrancy beyond blood.  

With patience and understanding, he nursed her back to health.  He made her drinks and food and escorted her wherever she needed to go.  She believed she was weak from the coma, but the reanimation process was jarring to the newly living human tissue, and he gave her the time she needed to recuperate.  All the while, he felt his desire for her.  He felt a yearning for her, to be with her, to palliate his loneliness.  All the while, he watched her for any discrepancy, testing her with questions, testing her reactions to stimuli, offering her foods he knew she did not like.  With complete innocence, she answered every question, never knowing what was at stake.  He knew not to push her into sex with him.  Too many times it had ended in disappointment.  The reaction of the recreation had disappointed him.  He watched her dressing and undressing.  He waited patiently for her.  He knew from experience now when the right time would come.  When it came, he seized on the opportunity and seduced her.  She had been a little reticent at first, but as he asserted himself, she had responded appropriately.  They made love for the first time late at night. He felt his loneliness ebb away as they coupled in the darkness of their bedroom.  The wind howled beyond the windows, and the roar of the foaming breaks thundered rhythmically from outside.  The two existed in isolation.  Jane was back with him again, and his grief was ending.  The pain and emptiness were dissolving.  Memory, imagination, reality and hope were fusing together in his mind as he made love to his wife again.  This was the closest he had come to recreating her.  She was submissive in just the right way, just the way Jane had been.  He felt truly alive for the first time in 10 years.  Afterwards, whilst she slept, he wept into his pillow, frightened she might hear him.  The weight of his secret sobbed out of his body along with his grief and loneliness.  

In the coming months, they spent every day together, and the passion of a newly discovered love affair bloomed between them.  She was Jane.  In every possible way, she resembled his wife.  He loved her with all his heart.  He felt the surge of recrudescent love and happiness swell through his body.  

He shut away his laboratory.  He nailed shut the door and plastered over the opening whilst Jane slept.  The lab was underground, so she never suspected anything.  The more time that went by, the happier he felt, and so he cleaned up the house.  He shooed the birds away and scraped their shit off the windows.  He and Jane would sit in the kitchen looking out to sea as they used to do; they didn’t talk, they just watched the waves crashing into the rocks and watched the seagull sway and dive along the cliff top.  The simple pleasures he took in life were suddenly reawakened to him.  The things he used to do with Jane, he felt he could do again.  Without her, those things had seemed pointless.  He had done a fine job of her.  The years of failure had been worth it.  The emotional cost to him had been worth it.  The years alone, working on the recreations, had been worth it.  The deaths and disappointment had been worth it.  

Sitting together in the kitchen, James held Jane’s hand as they looked out onto the horizon. He ran his fingers through her finger joints, feeling the wrinkles in the skin, feeling the skin shift against the bone.  He massaged her knuckles and ran the tips of his fingers across the moles and liver spots on the back of her hand, marvelling at his pursuit of perfection and his near achievement of it.  He pinched the loose skin gently between her fingers.  The sea stretched out before them in a seamless, featureless plane.  The only sign of movement was the spray appearing over the cliff edge and the seagulls hanging precipitously against the rheumy salt-filled wind.  They hung profoundly against the gale, holding their taut wings out, darting left and right above the cliff edge, brilliant white against the foully leaden sky.  They sat together in silence.  Then Jane spoke.

“The seagulls look beautiful, don’t they, darling?”  She said without turning to him.  She watched the seagulls dart away through the flecks of sea spray and out of sight.  He said nothing in reply but instead hung his head in grief and shame.

THE END

Copyright Notice

© B. J. A. Samuel. All rights reserved. This short story is the intellectual property of the author and may not be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission, except for brief quotations used in reviews or scholarly discussion.