LIFE

The World’s Not Dying

It just smells like it

Ryan Frawley
Ellemeno
Published in
6 min readApr 23, 2024

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A velella washed up on the beach. Photo by author.

The beach smells like death.

To some extent, they always do.

Death by sea is different from death on land. There’s no hot ferrous tang of mammalian blood. Everything that comes from the sea smells, more or less, the same.

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Ryan Frawley
Ellemeno

Novelist. Essayist. Former entomologist. Now a full-time writer exploring travel, art, philosophy, psychology, and science. www.ryanfrawley.com