Buried on the Beaches

“ ‘Because anything that can happen to you, can happen on the Cape.’ It was our version of the concluding words of a sermon, or a prayer, after which it was time to stand up, or sit down again, head bowed, knowing that you lived in a place unlike any other, and maybe more like any other, too, when you got into the internal part of everyone and everything here.”   So says one narrator in Colin Fleming’s masterful collection of short stories set in Cape Cod—a magically gritty and self-contained universe where landlubber tourists are called “googans” and locals drink at dive bars like “Sez the Flounder” and “The Ticky Crab.” An aging veterinarian sifts through his memories of working on a whale-watching ship with a charismatic wanderer named Jibber Stokes; a Yarmouth filmmaker agonizes over the contents of a mysterious video that his best friend took of his beautiful cousin when they were teenagers; a troubled composer returns to his dysfunctional musical family in Chatham, complete with ancestral claims that “we had relatives that once kept the Nina rocking on the Pilgrims’ maiden voyage with some improvised instruments made out of driftwood that they scooped from the sea with those big hats of theirs.”  With subtle grace and quiet wisdom, Buried on the Beaches vividly evokes the natural beauty of the Cape to depict the complex negotiations between individuals and their environment, memory and nostalgia, and the living and the dead.