The Water Doesn't Want You

THE WATER DOESN'T WANT YOU

by Rebecca Bennett

The closer they are to the beach, the more Jay's ice cream tastes of salt. Persimmon and vanilla swirl, tart and sweet just three feet back, ebbs into a burning taste. With each lick, each step, salt sears pockets of sores in Jay’s mouth until their gums blister and pop.

The tang of blood doesn’t add to the taste.

Jay spits on the ground and watches the red-tinged bubbles settle into the grains of sand, rock, and glass that make up the waterfront.

"We'll need to move the boundary marker up." Cait stays kneeled by the frayed red masking tape, marking the place where Halton Harbour goes off kilter. 

Halton has strange tides, Jay's grandmother used to say. Strange tides, strange winds.

It’s not supposed to be a place you make a home, not for most people. ​​Halton's a rest stop between Quebec and New Brunswick, a stomping ground that isn't English or French enough for either province—and doesn't get the amenities of either.

The town is small, five blocks between the welcome sign and the waterfront. Quaint, maybe. If you like peeling paint, an underground moonshine scene, and a high suicide rate. Even with all the newcomers, Halton wears its isolation like a stench that can’t be masked. Not by the apothecary that took over the old general store. Not by the cloying yeastiness of the brunch place that bought the Canadian-Chinese diner. It's an ancient rot—a malfeasance—that must have started with Crown Lands forcing out the Mi'kmaq, then the Acadians who were resettled and later expelled. 

Ten years ago, Halton was all drive-thru tourists. Five years ago, there was a slow trickle of campers. Now, with Toronto landlords looking for the next goldmine, tourists who can’t afford the waterfront views of Muskoka roll in with their wicker aesthetics and money to burn.

An ice cream stand whose cones reek of brine will never survive a Halton summer. Cait is still more boss than friend, a line Jay measures and toes as often as the tides.

"How far does the seaweed flavour go?" Jay asks. 

Cait looks at them, bones crunching when she steps. 

"Further. A couple of feet at least." 

The light green soft serve is dripping down Cait's hand. The flavour is earthy and salty, and worth the hours it takes to find at the nearest T&T. 

“I hoped leaning into salt and umami was the way to go, but after what happened with the miso ginger ice cream…” Cait doesn’t need to finish the sentence. 

The scars in Jay's mouth tell the rest of the story. Crystalized ginger sharpened into glass until it cut and clotted into soft flesh. The first time they spit blood onto the shore. Knotted tissue interrupts the wet velvet of Jay's cheeks, raised landmarks for each failed flavour. The water creeps further up the shore each year, shortening the distance between safe and not.

Their back teeth worry into the scars as Cait tosses both samples into the trash. 

"Guess we're movin' the chairs closer to the hut, then." Cait sighs. The boardwalk around the hut doesn't extend far, still yellow and smelling like pine. It's safe for now, lets their flavours stay sharp without cutting into flesh. One day though, the resin will turn and soak into the wood. The boards will inflate and peel like cardboard. Cait's hut, if it stays, will be another abandoned shack along the sand. 

Jay nods and spits again, this time more orange than red. Their tongue prods but finds no open wounds. Better them to take the brunt of testing than Cait, better them than the newcomers. Jay deserves Halton, its rot is written into their bones. They know what it means to be harmed and haunted by the place. “I’d take an axe to the benches by the shore, but I think the water will take care of that for me.”

“You talk like it’s alive,“ Cait huffs, still new to Halton. Still hopeful and dreaming of curated socials with padded accounts. “There’s a TikTok about how air quality can change the perception of taste. I’ll send it to you.”

The benches had been built in the fall, commissioned from a carpenter in Wakefield. The boards were made from local pine and curved to resemble a canoe. Once installed, red seaweed crept in from the waves, staining the wooden seats, the algae cracking the smoothed woodgrain. Sodden and splintered: that’s how most things end up in Halton.

The whole town feels damp. Water stains spill over ceilings, up walls. Clothes rot. High school gym shoes are especially rank. Even in the heat of July, when the sun tries to dry everything out, dehumidifiers line every hallway. The tourists don't see it, don't feel the moist weight of the air. They see sand and surf—not the truth in between. 

Tester pints are left to melt in the beachhut’s sink. They try more flavours, all of them failures. Blueberry cobbler layers transform into ribbons of mould when Jay steps onto the sand. Crème brûlée blackens as Jay walks the boardwalk until even Cait can smell the smoke. Rhubarb so sharp Jay’s mouth puckers like it did after their father—

Drowned?

Jay still isn’t sure if that’s the right word. Is there a word for when the sea scoops you from the shore? When it drags you into its arms, like a harried mother with a tantruming toddler. Nothing else quite covers the noise and struggle.

Taste-testing done, Jay washes the containers, orders more cream and eggs, and updates the hut's website with summer hours. It's not meditative. There is no peace in Halton, no matter how aggressively the tourists lounge. Ignore the water too long and it finds ways to make itself known. Like the seagulls who careen into the hut's windows daily, smashing their beaks into the glass. Cait still startles with each dull thump and sharp cry. Jay keeps working, keeps ignoring the break of waves against the shore, the crashing like—

No. Not today.

They let their thoughts drift until Cait turns off the equipment and wipes down the counters. She shepherds Jay out the door, still talking about flavours. Jay watches Cait, illuminated in the tiny shack, just a speck on the beach's expanse, before walking home. The crash and ebb of water echoes despite the growing distance from shoreline. Jay locks their apartment door, draws the blinds, and turns their headphone volume up until it drowns out the sound of the ocean.

•••

Jay wakes. Skin damp, bed wet, the sensation of salt water prickling over their skin. At three a.m., their sheets go into the hamper and Jay opens the blinds.

There’s no ocean view from their apartment—blocked by a Shoppers Drug Mart under construction across the way. Salt whitewashes the iron skeleton of the build. An opening sign sags against its posts, stickered with later and later opening dates. Grassy cobblestones crumble into newly-poured asphalt, the ragged edges of Halton's old roads butting against Shoppers's graded lot. The fresh parking lines brilliant against the black.

They don’t scrabble to open the window, just slowly unlatch and raise the sash. It’s a routine, so well-worn Jay can’t pretend to be surprised. They breathe deep, stale apartment air filling their lungs, then lean out the window to exhale. They press up against the wall until their hips meet the window frame until splinters dig into their stomach.

Inhale. Exhale.

The air is heavy with salt like a weighted blanket over Jay’s flesh. It’s comforting and overwhelming at the same time. Their sinuses fill and drain between breaths. Saliva and snot coat the back of Jay’s throat until they have to cough and spit it out. It’s warm, thick, and sticks in Jay’s mouth when they think of their grandmother’s reaction. It’s bad enough to live in this town. It’s even worse to be someone so badly raised that you think horking wads of phlegm onto the streets is acceptable.

They count their breaths until the view burns into Jay’s brain. Until they can draw each line in their mind’s eye. The dark ground. The night sky. The bloated body of their father at the center.

There’s no ocean view. Except when there is.

When too-late meets too-early and Jay is startled awake by the surge of water against their skin.

The construction site inverts, shifting into a reflection of something that cannot be. A mirage left in its place. Jay’s father, standing on the shore, beckoning them to step closer.

•••

“You gonna look this tired all summer?” Cait shouts above the churn of the ice cream maker.

Jay shrugs, cracking open an egg with one hand. They practiced all winter, until their wrist could flick just right and the break was clean. The whites slime over their fingers, dripping into the bowl for meringue. They’ve settled on a few safe flavours, options that will let the tourists wander closer—but not onto—the beach. Roasted seaweed. Sea salt and lemon. Red currant and vanilla, the jam so bright it leaches into the yellow custard, staining its way through the pint like sargassum combed from the beach.

The golden yolk slides into its own bowl as Jay cracks the next egg. Green foam pours over their fingers. There’s body to the liquid, but nowhere near as viscous as it should be. The smell is not the sulphuric rottenness of bad eggs but the rotten saltiness of an ignored ocean.

“Christ.” Cait coughs and runs to click on the countertop fan. It oscillates, blowing the scent throughout the room rather than dispersing it. “That’s the third egg today. I need to call our supplier, see what the hell is going on with their chickens. Free-range my ass.”

“You’re not really here for the ocean are you?” Jay asks as Cait jabs an angry email into her tablet. 

People come for the ocean, staying only because it speaks to them or the town calls to them. Halton’s waterfront has had a lot of conversations over the last few years. Just not, it seems, with Cait. She's like one of the tourists, blind to how the ocean floods every sense. How it demands forgiveness and devotion for all it takes.

“I’m a Taurus, don’t really fuck with water,” Cait says absently. “I just get antsy if I’m not, like, actually in nature.”

“And you chose Halton? Rather than, somewhere in the Maritimes?” Jay strains to keep the conversation going. Anything to avoid looking into the bowl of egg whites. They can imagine the green foam floating above the clear liquid. Wonder if there’s a speck of red within it, an inkling of a dead man.

“I’m not really one for hospitality. I just want to run a business, not get up into everyone else's.” She sends a pointed look to Jay. “I don’t care what you get up to outside of work, just don’t bring it in. Get some sleep for god’s sake.”

Jay grips the bowl, white-knuckled, before taking it outside to dump. They linger at the compost behind the hut, pretending to toss the remains. With a quick glance at the door, Jay walks to the water's edge. The sand smoothes out in front of their feet, welcoming them to where the water crests against the shore. They focus on the horizon, letting the glare of the sun burn their eyes before dragging their gaze down to their shoes already soaked as the water ripples around their feet.

They meet the face of their father, head nestled between Jay's shoes. Bone-white and puffy, he spits and coughs, green foam bubbling up between his lips. His eyes bulge as he looks up, red veins broken in the white mucus.

He mouths something. Jay knows, even without knowing the exact words, what he wants. He wants them to lean closer into the waves, to see how far it will take them from the shore.

Jay overturns the bowl, letting the contaminated whites fall onto the mirage, and walks back to the hut.

•••

The beach is combed at night; rakes pile up red sargassum and water-worn trash. That was Jay’s first job, actually. Walking their section of the beach, building small mountains of noxious algae to be bagged and carted away. Each time the beach is cleaned, fine rake lines creating order in the sand, more waste seeps through at the next tide. It flows in and out of Halton. 

Before the tourists, there were the townspeople. Settled from all over. The town was always a point on the map, even as far back as the voyageurs. A fixed place, even if the Crown said no one lived there and swept their crimes into the sea.

Jay imagines one person arriving at an already-built home. Then another. Then another.

Their grandfather was called here after World War II when the only thing that eased his nerves was saltwater. Every day, Jay’s mother said, he would walk to the shore, drag a tin cup against the water, then drink his fill.

He liked the small town well enough that, when he advertised for a bride, he convinced one to leave Poland. They raised a daughter by the beach, letting her wash in the ocean until her hair crusted with salt.

Jay’s mother married a tourist. She learned, like Jay learned, like every teenager with a broken heart learns, that obsession and love are too easily mistaken.

Her father would pace the shore. Would complete daily polar bear dips, even when his skin mottled red and white from the cold and his eardrums popped from the roar of the water.

Jay can’t sleep above the sound of the ocean. The need to look out the window, to watch the not-ocean, is tidal. It pulls at Jay no matter how hard they push back. Halton’s insistence grows each year, demanding more of their attention. Jay's bedclothes are soaked again, even though they don’t remember falling asleep and haven’t touched water in two days.

Their throat is hot and sore. It burns to cough up the always-present phlegm. They spit it onto the street, thick and green in the darkness. Grandma kept it all in, priding herself on ladylike appearances even as the mucus dissolved her flesh, eating holes into her throat.

In the mirage, their father waves. It can't be him, not really; he's never been so attentive. He hated that Jay didn't crave the water the same way. Always wanted to slough it from their skin, scrub away the salt and sand.

60 days of tourist season. 60 days of Halton wading through its resentment, letting its sourness permeate the beach.

Jay lets it wash over them: the douse of saltwater; the rancid bitterness of rotten seaweed; the smell of a fermenting corpse.

•••

The calendar in the beachhut is updated. Red marker circles the first arrival of the ferry and its tourists. Jay pours newly-churned ice cream into a metal container, fills the dipper well with warmed sea-water, and lets the ice cream scoop soak.

“Another ice cream test?” Cait asks. “For safety?”

 The words are slow to arrive. A man is pacing the shore. 

"Jay?"

“I think we’re as safe as we’re gonna get.” Jay says, still monitoring the man on the beach whose steps are even, clear in their discipline. Even with his back bent and stance crooked, the man patrols back and forth.

 “Do you think the sea salt flavour is too much like seawater? I’m starting to second guess everything.” Cait spoons out a small measure for Jay to try. The ice cream base is brilliant white with specks of freeze-dried lemon peel.

Jay allows Cait to place the spoon against their lips. It's strange to have Cait so close, while Jay's grandfather is traipsing through the sand. His dead hands cupping saltwater and bringing it to his mouth. Jay tastes the ice cream just as he drinks deeply. Tongues seeking the taste even though they know what it will be.

It tastes like the day Jay’s father threw them into the water. The burn of seawater as it flooded their nose. The salinity of the mucus as they gasped for air. The water tossed Jay back out, but not before ropes of seaweed wove about their legs, red blisters rising wherever the rotten algae touched. Jay emerged hurt and gasping onto the rocky water edge, only able to squint through the spray as the tide dragged their father out instead.

The ice cream tastes green in their mouth. Bubbly and frothy, fresh-churned from the water instead of a machine.

 It tastes like Halton, salty and bitter.

•••