Jetsam/Flotsam.(Language warning.)

[phinedaros]

1)I stood unmoving on the shore as the sun sank into the crashing ocean waves, seagulls cried in the distance.

What did I hope to find here? Anything of use would have been swept away by the tide a thousand times over since I made that grisly discovery weeks before.

It was close to sunset, storm clouds hovered in the south.

I was jogging in an attempt to slow the muscular distrophy that was slowly eating away my shins and ankles.

I was one of the rare few to have it in both legs.

Lucky fucking me.

I paused when I noticed something had washed ashore.

Probably from the neighbouring island. The East side of Riley isle did has a sizeable trashyard and it wasn't uncommon for some trash to find itself tossed around by the tide.

It was a large misshapen thing. Wrapped in hospital gowns and stained bedsheets, surprisingly the gulls were ignoring it.

When I got close I noticed the smell.

Rotten meat.

I could now make out the shape.

Humanoid.

I took out my phone and dialed the police.

After a wait that seemed to take several eternities the cops came up, emergency response crew in tow.

Cutting open the wrap they revealed what I had already known.

It was indeed a corpse.

[Ferstofus]

No more beach sunsets for mister gowned guy.

[phinedaros]

2) Naturally the media was everywhere, but since no further information was revealed all they had to go on where speculation and conspiracy.

They stood at the sawhorse barracades with their flashing bulbs, their view blocked by the line of police and the EMT crew.

Finding the body didn't bother me, nor did questions asked by the cops.

The one thing that bothered me was the fact I recognized them.

I saw them several years ago.

By all accounts. The corpse they were loading into the ambulance was already supposed to be buried.

I should know.

I paid for his funeral.

[phinedaros]

3) His name was Robert Wyatt.

A trucker by trade and tough as nails, but being tough couldn't protect him from a massive brain embolism that took him out while he was delivering a truckload of lumber.

The resulting crash took out fifteen people and left one in a coma.

He was a great friend.

I couldn't deal with his death.

I didn't attend the funeral, the most I could do is get him a decent tombstone.

While he was put to ground I was in a bar twelve miles away and nine drinks away from becoming absolutely shit-faced.

Now here he was again, only wrapped up in bedsheets and hospital gowns.

[phinedaros]

The police promised to keep in touch with any info they could share about the whole ordeal.

I would rather wait on a rain of gold doubloons-it was just as likely to happen, maybe even a bit more so.

[phinedaros]

I swept my gaze across the beach, ignoring the sound of gulls,

ignoring the sound of the crashing waves.

Above me the sky was turning reddish orange with the approaching sunset.

[phinedaros]

4) Weeks have past now, no word from the police.

Not that I'm surprised.

I wanted to put it behind me, but something about the entire thing -

Something I heard, something I saw but didn't immediately register in my mind - was deep in my mind rattling chains.

Try as I might I could not coax this thought to the surface.

[phinedaros]

I must have revisited that stretch of beach hundreds of times.

Staring over the same section of ocean time after time.

Something was bothering me about my discovery.

Was it the location?

The bodies' identity?

The state I found the body in?

Of course! A corpse in the ocean wouldn't last long intact.

The cloth it was wrapped in wouldn't have prevented fish from nibbling at the body very well.

Yet the body didn't have a scratch on it...

Come to think of it, he was missing his heart surgery scar as well, could I be wrong about the identity?

[phinedaros]

After all, a corpse buried as long as his would have been...messy, to say the least.

[phinedaros]

5) I had shared my thoughts with the the officers that were investigating the whole ordeal, they decided to dig up Wyatt's grave.

If anything, to ensure he was indeed still buried there and that no one did a switch.

Why someone would switch one corpse for another was a question I wanted to ask, but considering a few grave robberies had happened- albeit sporadically- I figured the culprit's decided to add some body switching as a joke only they would be privy to.