Status: Re-uploaded 20/09/12.
The Sea Breathes
Crash
I do not hear her.
My eyes are focused, beady and scavenger-like, on the creamy, calcite swirl upon the rock. It is far more valuable to me than it ever was to sea eagles when it held moist flesh. Inside it, I know, is something infinitely more satisfying– a fragment of the sea, like the echo of her voice I pressed against my ear.
That wonderful cone –a temple built by the architect of snails, with a vanilla ice-cream steeple, and rich, violet bruises where its soul and body parted– houses a part of her. She is captive within it, and has mounted her prison as the centrepiece on her fine-toothed, fish-boned comb.
I understand.
While she flounders, wondering, I move. I am fast. The hairpiece with the shell is snatched, and now the dying light describes it; a tide of gold washing it, not onto the sand, but upon the flushed skin of my hand. I clasp it like a trophy, sealing my fist to my heart.
The sea wails. I smile, and make sounds to soothe her.
‘There, there,’ I say. ‘You’ve shown me your world, now I must show you mine. It’s only courteous.’
Her eyes are liquid, and their irises toss like the yearning waves behind her. Row upon row, they charge and break themselves across the beach, foaming with the madness of their lust, and their desperation to climb further up the shore. Yet, the sea cannot break the boundaries of her pit. Looseness chains her.
All day, she writhes and tosses in her hollow, proud and angry. She lunges at the rocks, grappling with them and clawing them into herself. She tears down. She consumes, but she will never be sated, and still...
Like the ghost of molluscs, she whispers inside those smallest pieces of her body that stray furthest inland. She does not truly wish to be parted from her rage. In shallow pools, she lies prostrate, begging the beachcombers not to take them.
The sea is stolen. Piece by piece, she is carted into the village, her salt and her spirit washed away by tap water, and displayed upon mantelpieces, like mine. The sea is made clean. I clutch the shell, and watch as the water around the sea runs with veins of mercury. She looks longingly back at her body, watching as it dissolves into itself.
The tail vanishes. The sea cries saltwater in a futile effort to restore it. Her twinkling scales become fresh sand. Like oil coursing off a ship, her precious metal runs out to where the blue is deepest, and she cannot follow it.
She is folded, pale and naked, like a foal. She wraps her former body around her, so that the water is a blanket, lapping comfortingly.
The sea breathes air, and nothing else.
My eyes are focused, beady and scavenger-like, on the creamy, calcite swirl upon the rock. It is far more valuable to me than it ever was to sea eagles when it held moist flesh. Inside it, I know, is something infinitely more satisfying– a fragment of the sea, like the echo of her voice I pressed against my ear.
That wonderful cone –a temple built by the architect of snails, with a vanilla ice-cream steeple, and rich, violet bruises where its soul and body parted– houses a part of her. She is captive within it, and has mounted her prison as the centrepiece on her fine-toothed, fish-boned comb.
I understand.
While she flounders, wondering, I move. I am fast. The hairpiece with the shell is snatched, and now the dying light describes it; a tide of gold washing it, not onto the sand, but upon the flushed skin of my hand. I clasp it like a trophy, sealing my fist to my heart.
The sea wails. I smile, and make sounds to soothe her.
‘There, there,’ I say. ‘You’ve shown me your world, now I must show you mine. It’s only courteous.’
Her eyes are liquid, and their irises toss like the yearning waves behind her. Row upon row, they charge and break themselves across the beach, foaming with the madness of their lust, and their desperation to climb further up the shore. Yet, the sea cannot break the boundaries of her pit. Looseness chains her.
All day, she writhes and tosses in her hollow, proud and angry. She lunges at the rocks, grappling with them and clawing them into herself. She tears down. She consumes, but she will never be sated, and still...
Like the ghost of molluscs, she whispers inside those smallest pieces of her body that stray furthest inland. She does not truly wish to be parted from her rage. In shallow pools, she lies prostrate, begging the beachcombers not to take them.
The sea is stolen. Piece by piece, she is carted into the village, her salt and her spirit washed away by tap water, and displayed upon mantelpieces, like mine. The sea is made clean. I clutch the shell, and watch as the water around the sea runs with veins of mercury. She looks longingly back at her body, watching as it dissolves into itself.
The tail vanishes. The sea cries saltwater in a futile effort to restore it. Her twinkling scales become fresh sand. Like oil coursing off a ship, her precious metal runs out to where the blue is deepest, and she cannot follow it.
She is folded, pale and naked, like a foal. She wraps her former body around her, so that the water is a blanket, lapping comfortingly.
The sea breathes air, and nothing else.