Matthew Zanoni Müller was born in Bochum, Germany and grew up in Eugene, Oregon and upstate New York. He received his BA in Creative Writing and Literature from Emerson college and holds an MFA from Warren Wilson's MFA Program for Writers.

The Beach in Nicaragua (August 20, 2010. Issue 20.)

We rode a large rented van up through the mountains and villages where gangs of young people would shout “Gringos, gringos,” and we’d wave and keep moving. We stopped the night at an old house and drank coffee from plastic cups that a woman gave us, her hands shaking and her face puckered by age. We descended from the mountain in an old bus stuffed with people headed for the ocean and all of us became weak by the exhaust fumes, the landscape blurring through the windows and the driver singing along to his music and waving to cars he narrowly missed on the thin roads. The beach lay like a crumpled tablecloth along the walls of rock moving up to the mountains and the ocean swayed serene and friendly in the bright sun. We unpacked and ran through the sand, scrambled on the rocks and dove headlong into the warm water’s soft arms. I snuck off with a friend and we made for a large group of rocks at the bottom of a cliff. We heard a shout and turned to see one of the girls following us, begging us to wait. We smiled at each other and waited for her to join us, panting and smiling and then walked on, the three of us together, ready to see the glistening ocean from the vantage point of those dark rocks.

We ran in small spurts and pushed each other and threw sand until we came to the rocks and ran up them quickly where the waves smattered against them and threw up large curtains of white like a mother throwing her sheets to the bed. We crept closer and closer to the water and saw it pounding up a chute, a small break in the rocks, before collapsing like a colliding army into the rock. My friend turned and smiled and then ran for the chute, telling us he wanted to try to jump over. His feet left the ground and the waves channeled in and I could feel the girl’s hand tight on my arm as the water hit his feet and dragged him in. We lost his body in the white turmoil and the sky suddenly dropped closer to us and the waves became louder and the rocks hard and black. We locked eyes for a moment and then I jumped in after him. I only felt the waves rolling and turning me. I found his body, felt it struggling against mine, and I held it tight and tried to lift. Another wave came and washed us closer and I lifted and lifted him and saw his hands grappling at the rocks but they didn’t stay. We floated back down into the chute in almost a sigh of relief, giving ourselves away to the arms of the ocean, the surrender of the end.

I saw a brown form slipping down into the water and felt her arms grappling for mine. She tried to hold us, to push us back towards the rocks and another swell carried us in. I wanted to hold her away from the rocks and her thin body was slipping from mine and then we all tumbled and fell and I could feel my friend’s body above mine, lifting and lifting and then gone and the sand in the chute ground against my face and pulled me back. I rolled in the water like a drift log and lost my place in the world. There was no up or down, no sides, only my body tumbling and reaching with nothing to hold on to and for just a moment I wanted to remain like that, tumbling in the white and blue, the horizons of life and death separating out somewhere on either side of me, holding me in.

A dark wave lifted me off the sand again tunneling me back down the chute. I found a rock and held to it. When I came up from the water I saw my friend on the rocks with his shorts around his knees, spitting, breathing more important now than nakedness, and the girl was standing and looking into the water with a trickle of blood running down her leg. With the wave receding I knew that I had tested the soft surfaces of life, the deep hard edges behind them. I knew that when I got out I would hold the girls hand like a precious stone, her soft skin always about to disappear into the sky beyond the waves, us thin as salt, and alive as brine.