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It is the time of day when the sun gets so hot and so bright that all the colours of the world diminish in its pale sheen. The stenches of salt and brine and rotting seaweed grate your nose at each breath. That’s what you notice at Two Rocks Beach at midday when the westerly has come in on a cloudless day—the heat and the smell and the striking absence of colour upon the bone blanched sand. The ‘two rocks’ for which the place is named are immediately visible from the entry point to the beach—two squarish limestone blocks, about fifty metres apart, sitting right at the juncture of sand and sea. They sit stark and obtrusive on the sparse beach, like pieces leftover from a giant’s game of knucklebones. It is difficult to imagine how else they might’ve been deposited here, in a landscape so pale and fickle. The dunes themselves are only a slight rise, formations in transit, the loose sands shifting along them with the breeze. The sound of the wind is shrill and hollow along the beachscape, as if someone stretched out the chime of shattering glass. There is no one else here, and as we walk toward the rocks, my friend and I separate. She takes the high path along the dunes and I venture down to walk through mounds of rotting seaweed, which cover the better part of the width of the beach. The seaweed is strewn in black, crusting heaps across the entire length of beach, as if regurgitated from the mouth of the sea. A slight heat effuses from the dark lattice, and as I step onto it, it gives a little. Its thickest parts sponge down into the soft sand, and I am suspicious at each step, as if the seaweed pile might open up like a crevice and take me. I look up to my friend to see if she would notice my disappearance, but she has vanished into the undulations of the dunes. Carefully, I make it across to the waters edge. The wet sand there is clay-like, and I walk in thick-patted steps, feeling grateful at the resonance of compacted earth. The tide is low. The swell today laps spiritless, its pale froth foaming languidly along the long shallow shore, churning with sand and dune plants and other detritus dislodged by the breezes pressing in from the west. I get to the rocks just before my friend does. From this distance, we can see the rocks are honeycombed through, and populated by a variety of weeds and dune plants. In their deeper catacombs, there are masses of dark lichen. We try to find forms in the rocks, divining meaning through their pallid pores and weathered shapes. From one angle, the larger of the two appears to be a woman with her legs splayed languorously open. In the other, my friend sees a serpentine creature morphing through the rock, as if trying to squeeze through the final membrane of an egg mid-hatching. My friend goes in for a closer look. Suddenly she screams. “What is it?” “Come see! Come see what this is!” It is only after I am right upon the rocks that I realise what the shadowy growths along the rock face really are: flies. There are thousands of them. A pestilence of flies clustering in all the nooks of the great limestone blocks like black pools of water, warped and gravity-less, hanging in their droves along the rock façades in some vision of science-fiction, somehow undetected, their buzzing enveloped by the obliterating noise of the howling wind. I feel a slight nausea as they clamour over each other in their insectoid layers, but they are mesmerising. Our curiosity gets the better of us. A stick is procured, and hurled at the mass fly gathering. We squeal as they descend upon us, running up the beach in scrambled laughter and then back down to the rock to watch the flies re-magnetize in their cluster. Our disturbances ripple them out in frenzied clouds, but each time they settle back to their stasis, humming like a void within the rock, forgetting we were ever there at all.