[This story was submitted for the January 2024 Australian Writers’ Centre Furious Fiction contest. It was selected for the longlist out of hundreds of entries. Contestants had to write a 500-word story that matched the following prompts: Each story had to take place on a character’s first day of a new job, each story had to include something being stolen, and each story had to include the words trip, triangle, and tsunami.]

Content warning: Death due to natural disaster.

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Darma stood atop the mountain of tsunami debris. Car tire, flat. Shredded, soiled mattress. Headless mannequin. Splintered wood. Nike, size thirteen, without a mate. Serrated corrugated metal. Another body bag.

He stretched his aching back as the sunrise peeked over the horizon. He adjusted the handkerchief covering his face, eyes watering from the stench, and resumed looting. He’d been sifting through this alley all night — with nothing more to show for it than a few pieces of copper wire, a dented can of sardines, and a pack of cigarettes.

He lifted a metal cabinet, struggling momentarily under its weight. Losing his balance as he shoved it to the side, he tripped and scrambled backward, horrified by what he’d unearthed.

The woman’s ebony hair spilled out of her disheveled hijab. Her floral print dress was smattered with dried blood. Mangled limbs hinted at untold injuries. Lifeless eyes stared at him from her tomb of rubble. Another victim of the sea.

Sunlight descended into the alley, refracting against something on the woman’s chest — a triangle-shaped pendant on a golden chain.

Darma carefully unclasped the necklace and inspected it. At its center, the pendant featured a large sea-blue diamond. 

Jackpot. Maybe I can finally get the cartel off my back.

“Hey, new guy,” someone shouted from the end of the alley. 

Darma slipped the necklace into his pocket and turned. A man wearing a yellow hard hat was glaring at him, hands on his hips.

“What are you doing over here? I thought I told you to load the truck for the landfill,” the man said, pointing down the street. “Get back to work.”

Darma hesitated, but the man waited, unwavering. He played along to avoid getting caught and headed in the direction of the dump truck.

“Damn temps,” the man muttered as he trailed behind him.

Darma spent the afternoon toiling alongside temporary workers, taking relentless orders from the man in the hard hat and waiting for the opportunity to sneak away with his pocketed treasure. He had flung so many objects into dump trucks — battered washing machines, broken-down recliners, busted bookcases — that he could barely raise his shaking arms above his head. As he sat amid the detritus to rest, wringing sweat from his shirt, a finger tapped his shoulder.

 “Excuse me, sir. I’m looking for my wife. Have you seen her?” 

The man’s pleading eyes shifted between hope, desperation, and fear as he handed a photograph to Darma — a woman with a crinkly-eyed smile standing on the beach, hijab billowing in the breeze, arms reaching for the clouds, bare feet buried in the sand. And there, around her neck, was the necklace burning a hole in Darma’s pocket. 

We’re all victims of the sea now.

“Sorry,” Darma replied, “haven’t seen her.”

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Copyright © Jamie Gregory 2024