The Gulp of Amnesia

They renamed the coastline The Gulp of Amnesia, as if the water could swallow its own history and spare them the embarrassment. The waves offered no endorsement. They rolled in, rolled out, uninterested in federally mandated forgetfulness. The Department of Ambient Panic recalibrated their dashboards for signs of patriotic renewal, but the graphs sagged, as if the data itself had lost interest.

The memo announcing the rename drifted sideways into the Office of Strategic Misfires, where clerks excel at completing tasks no one asked for. They stamped the order twice, misdated it, and forwarded it to the Agency for Retroactive Justifications, which reverse-engineered a noble purpose for calling an entire shoreline a neurological lapse. Meanwhile, the Subcommittee on Weaponized Semantics argued over whether “gulp” connotes submission, hunger, or dread—an argument the Directorate of Unverified Bravado resolved by pounding the table and declaring linguistic victory.

A Secretary of Procedural Delusions signed off with a signature that wandered into the margins like a lost pedestrian. This was enough to engage the Department of Fog, which insisted the problem was visibility: too much of it. They recommended softening the coastline into suggestion rather than fact, dissolving its edges in the national interest.

By evening, the whole dossier had migrated to the Homeland Insecurity Council, whose members specialize in trembling beneath fluorescent light. They passed it on to the Predatory Commission on Half-Said Hostilities, who read the documents, stared at the rebranded horizon, and concluded the shoreline might need to be double-tapped into submission.

Indifferent, the sea waved on—insouciant, unflagging.