Sinclair Cabocel: THE ARMAGEDDON SURF CLUB • Cleaver Magazine

Fiction by Sinclair Cabocel
THE ARMAGEDDON SURF CLUB

When the trumpets sounded, Monica was propped up on her elbows, watching Mateo shred from the sandy shore. The other beachgoers swiveled their heads, as if they might find some passing band or a thumping boombox, but the resonating noise seemed to have no source, as inherent to the air as the humidity. The seagulls soon joined in with their own discordant shrieks, while the sandpipers dotting the surf all retreated to the dunes in choppy little steps.

Pretty hot for March, Monica thought, sitting up to give her leathered shoulders a break.

Vacationers and locals alike fled toward dry land. Swimmers ran from the water with their suits still stuck to their skin, not taking the time to rinse the muck from their feet. Sunbathing mothers grabbed their children and hobbled away, towels and foldable chairs clamped tight in their oily armpits. The rest of Mateo’s crew, in contrast, quickly settled back into surfing and spectatorship, perhaps seeing that neither he nor Monica had reacted much at all.

The setting sun had begun bleeding out into the sky like a broken red yolk, but Mateo kept riding his wave, sculpted and stoic, as though the Earth would be knocked off its orbit before he’d be tossed from his board. Monica had always adored how unshakable he was; a bronze bust of a man, his face rarely shifted from a daydreaming contentment, which made what seldom emotions he did share (which were generally limited to humor or horniness) that much more pleasant to bask in. The dying wave brought Mateo to a soft stop, after which he stepped down from his board and high-fived his best friend, Diego. The man pointed to the sky, the gesture momentarily warping the tattooed crucifix across his back. He spoke too quietly for Monica to hear. Mateo shrugged and started back out toward the shattered horizon.

His constancy was a comfort Monica had never known away from that shore, and she had grown into it. After such relentless sunning, they could have passed for the same dark square in a Pantone swatch, and it became difficult for her to recall that she’d been someone else before all this. Memories of waitressing or brief stints as a temp worker had all but faded from her mind, along with any recollection of how her mother had booted her from the house after high school, declaring it would force the daughter to, as she said, get her shit together. In reality, her mother simply wanted her new boyfriend to move in, and Monica was probably ruining the vibe.

Regardless, work was dreadful—and paying rent even more so—so when she stumbled upon the shacks by the shore, along with the surfers who had made a life away from life, she fell into their patterns effortlessly. Even Monica’s relationship with Mateo felt like something she’d been slotted into, making it all the more comfortable. Any lingering fear of abandonment was assuaged by the fact that Mateo had but a singular lust—namely, for spending each day on his board and each night silently sipping beer around a bonfire with his friends. Like any good groupie, Monica didn’t co-participate with her object of affection. She was content to laze her days away, watching, certain that nothing could have convinced her to walk away.

Cataclysms included.

“These are probably the end times,” Diego declared over dinner, scooping up some chowder from his bowl with a rough-torn piece of sourdough as the fire blazed before them. The stars above, having grown painfully swollen in the wounded sky, were weeping a ceaseless storm of meteors. “Think the savior can surf?”

“Not as good as Mateo,” Monica said. Her boyfriend closed his eyes and smiled, and she nestled deeper into his arms as she took another swallow of wine. One of the newer girls had brought a few bottles of cheap red, having had the good sense to offer her one as tribute. Unlike Monica, to whom this life was, in fact, a lifestyle, the other women were merely tourists, whether dating Diego or one of the other men, or drifting through as a novelty. They rarely stayed longer than a month before realizing that they, like performative Buddhists, weren’t that ready to let go of their worldly commitments. Monica, in contrast, could not be considered to be engaging in any sort of escapism—catching rays and watching Mateo were her only obligations.

Before the conversation could drift into a more pleasant topic, Diego spoke up again:

“Maybe we should pack up and move inland.”

Monica scooted herself upright and raised her eyebrows. Anxious looks were exchanged around the circle, though it was hard to tell whether the consternation was an echo of hers or a response to it. She leaned forward onto her knees, pressuring Diego to elaborate. Mateo puffed his cheeks and drew back the arm he had draped around her.

“The signs couldn’t be more obvious.” Diego set his bowl down, picked up his drink, and turned to the woman he was sharing the splintery bench with. “Put your hand in the flames.”

Desperate to impress, perhaps, she reached out toward the blaze, baring gritted teeth, until she finally lurched her arm forward and let her fingers dance among the tongues of fire.

“It’s… It’s cold!” she reported, withdrawing her hand and inspecting it for burns. Monica hadn’t registered it until then, but she was growing chilly outside of Mateo’s embrace, despite being only a few feet away from the flames. The chowder wasn’t all that warm, either.

“See?” Diego asked. “Everything is out of order. The first coming last and the last coming first. There’s no mistaking it: this is the apocalypse.”

“You’re just superstitious,” Monica said. Diego had been raised in Mexico by an expansive family of religious nutjobs—who knew what lunacies his subconscious had marinated in? What worried her more, however, was that he was the only one, besides her, who could convince Mateo of anything. And what would her and Mateo be without the beach?

He pointed to the sky. “You wanna tell me this isn’t real?”

“So what if it’s real?” she blurted, feeling Mateo tilt his head upwards from behind her. “Nuclear families are real. Nine-to-five jobs are real. Do you suddenly believe in that shit, too?”

Diego looked down into his plastic cup, where he must have had a heavy splash of tequila twirling with a cut of lime. “All I’m saying is I got a lot of sins to repent for, and I won’t have time to get through them all if we stick around here when the seas begin to boil.”

“If you regret something, maybe you shouldn’t have done it in the first place,” Monica said, feeling quite profound. Mateo nodded, and she settled in again, smiling as his hand went back around her shoulder. She remembered the first night she had spent around this very bonfire, tossing in her bills, business casual outfits, and high school diploma. Like Cortez, there were no boats for her to travel back on. She now graced the beach as a bronzed conqueror. There had never been a possibility for her to be homesick for an old, tired world. Paradise was hers.

Eventually satisfied with having had the last word, Monica dropped her bottle into the sand, pulled Mateo up, and led him back toward their shack, where they both fell onto the mattress on the wooden floor. She could see from the unblinking stillness of his eyes that he was still thinking of what Diego had said. Wanting to calm him—and perhaps convince herself of her own conviction—she looked up at him from his chest and then murmured into his ears.

“All this stuff is beyond us, anyways. Why worry about it?”

“What do you mean?” Mateo asked, looking out at the meteor shower through the shack’s sole window. Monica bit into her lip, as if trying to wring out a few more drops of wine.

“I mean, saviors, angels, antichrists… How would we even tell who’s who?”

Mateo yawned and gave a lazy, swaying laugh. “Maybe I’m the second coming.”

“Oh, totally,” Monica said, stroking his solid flank through a tapestry of her hair, feeling his abs tighten with every chuckle. Diego might’ve had a past, but with Mateo it seemed an impossibility. Even his tattoos had, like shells in the sand, been buried into his skin by the sun.

Despite the pervasive stink of death that had swept the beach, Monica and Mateo made love. Some time later, they fell asleep to the distant stomping of armies on the march.

The doors of the other shacks were all open when Monica went outside the next morning. Everyone else had left. All their trash, too, still littered the sand around the firepit, though that was nothing out of the ordinary. Mateo, having not bothered to shave his stubble, emerged alongside her with his board, and they walked toward the empty shore without a word. Winged creatures were pouring forth from the previous day’s crack across the sky, rushing toward one another to do battle across the Earth.

Monica took her place as Mateo made his way into the water. There was no use being bitter about Diego or the rest of the crew, she decided. She had Mateo all to herself now, and they could live out the rest of time together, undistracted by doubts or obligations.

It was getting unbearably hot, though, even in a bikini. After confirming that Mateo was the only other soul around, she stripped herself down. Her skin was shockingly pale and soft where the fabric had been, like it belonged to an entirely different person. Suddenly ashamed, she glanced up at her lover as he rolled in, hoping to find a look of lust, amusement, or tacit approval. His eyes, however, were contemplative again, lost somewhere in the distance. She crossed an arm over her sweating chest as he paddled back out.

A few growing waves passed by before he spotted one worth remounting for.

Far away, the demons and angels met in an explosive collision. Well beyond nuclear, its smoke bloomed into the sky like a bouquet, launching a blurry shockwave over the ocean. Mateo stood to ride his wave. The water propelled him forth, beginning to bubble and hiss. Beneath his feet, his board was shrinking. The now-steaming Pacific was gnawing away at its epoxy.

Still, Monica was smiling again, watching him surf until, finally, he lost his balance.

“Woah!” Mateo shouted, as though he had seen something terrifying beneath the surface. The bubbling wave, in a rushing front of violence, blew the board out from underneath him, sending its warped remains—and Mateo—into the boiling sea. Monica watched the water, waiting for him to emerge amidst the steam, parting his wet hair from his eyes and swimming back to shore. A few minutes passed. The approaching shockwave only gained speed.

If Monica had a tether to her life before Mateo, it was an occasional, fleeting curiosity regarding the people from her past. Her mother. Her roommates. Her coworkers and bosses. Where were they? What had happened to them? In the moment she realized Mateo would never resurface, however, she finally wondered what would become of her. Did she have any regrets?

Her reflection was cut short by the blast. The superheated air curled her hair to half its length and evaporated her tears. Peeling her flesh from her muscle and her muscle from her bone, the inferno left little behind but scattered ash and her soft imprint in the glassy sand beneath.

Sinclair Cabocel studied English at The College of William & Mary as a 1693 Scholar and at Oxford University. He is pursuing an MFA at Columbia University. His fiction has been published in the Chicago Quarterly Review, J Journal, and Failbetter. He is currently querying Hyperreal, an ambitiously eclectic short story collection, and Folly Bridge, a novel about a trio of despondent Oxford scholars being driven to insanity by a flock of psychotic geese. Explore his oeuvre at sinclairsays.com, or stalk him tastefully @SinclairCabocel on Instagram/X.