Between the Years

Photo: Katrin Schönig

By Paul Scraton:

We were supposed to leave on Boxing Day, but the waves raced in off the North Atlantic, crashing against the harbour walls and rolling over the loading bay where the fishing boats had been pulled on wheels out of the ocean’s reach. There was no ferry that day, as there hadn’t been since the 17th December, and the forecast was not good.

For two further days the wind and the waves hammered at the island. São Jorge is a thin sliver, a line of volcanic peaks falling away towards the ocean. If there is flat land to be found it is often on lava debris fields at the foot of cliffs, where villages were built that, for centuries – and in some cases still – are only accessible by foot. Across the channel it is possible to spy the neighbouring islands of Pico and, from the right vantage point, Faial. But if the winds and the waves are high, it does not matter how close they might be. No boats will leave the harbour, and no planes will rise from the airstrip.

We hunkered down, waiting for the break. At a local surf shop, the owner looked at the same website as the owner of our guesthouse had shown us on his phone. A line of coloured boxes, filled with numbers. The website is hosted in the Czech Republic but is apparently bookmarked on every browser in São Jorge. The surf shop owner translated what it meant. High winds. Big waves. We weren’t going anywhere.

Each evening came and with it the message that the ferry was cancelled for the following morning, until one evening when it didn’t. Our guesthouse owner was hopeful. Tomorrow, you can sail. But he promised to leave our beds made just in case. We were to message him only once we left harbour. Only then, would he know we had finally checked out.

At the port in the morning a trickle of passengers became a tide. It was more than ten days by now since the ferry to Pico and Faial had run. In that time, Christmas had come and gone, although the decorations were still up in town and festive songs were still playing through the loudspeakers that had been erected some time in December. Passengers checked in their bags and waited in the terminal buildings. 

Others lined up their cars, waiting to board. At the check in counter, a woman delivered a parcel that would travel on the ferry without her. A man did the same. A taxi driver delivered three boxes and then queued to pay for the transportation, before driving off to work the next fare. The weather forecast for the next day was bad, and for the day after too. This might be the only chance.

Photo: Katrin Schönig

We sat on deck and watched Velas and São Jorge slowly retreat. It would take two and a half hours to reach Faial via Pico, and the island remained in view throughout. It was a long farewell. The first crossing was rocky, the second was rough. Perhaps they wouldn’t have made the crossing if it hadn’t been more than a week since the last one. We stayed on deck and watched the horizon. Some passengers slept, laid out across the plastic chairs. Others headed inside and tried to ignore the motion, watching films on their phones or tablets. 

In the channel between São Jorge and Pico, in the central islands of the Azores in the middle of the Atlantic, the internet connection was better than Berlin. We weren’t surprised.

We were between the years and between the islands. In the channel between Pico and Faial a windsurfer raised alongside the ferry, flying above the waves that we were crashing through. The waves seemed to grow bigger the closer we got to Horta and our destination. The spray reached the top deck. Gulls hovered above. At least one passenger was sick. The time between the years is usually when nothing much happens. As we approached land and the rise and fall of the ferry seemed to intensify, we wondered if there were any more surprises left. 

At Horta harbour, where sailors from around the world have left their mark in colourful murals on the harbour wall, and where the first transatlantic seaplanes used to land between the boats, we felt solid land beneath our feet. That evening in Faial, we would still be able to hear the ocean breaking against the rocks below where we were to sleep. We could still feel the motion where we lay. And we could see the dance of the white horses as they broke between the islands behind our closed eyes.

Outside it was calm. The sky had cleared and the stars shone down on the islands and the ocean. Tomorrow, the sun would shine. But the waves had been growing, and the colours and the numbers on the Czech website were not good. The messages had been received. The ferry for the next morning had already been cancelled. 

Photo: Katrin Schönig

***

Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. His latest book is In the Pines, a novella of the forest with photography by Eymelt Sehmer, and published by Influx Press.

At Ocean's Mercy

A short story by Audrey T. Carroll:

The hazy ash gray, like a sick snow, blended line of ocean with line of sky. Willow hugged her thigh-grazing cardigan around herself to guard against the pitiful sighs of the water’s surface. Her hair whipped her cheeks, alternating with the salt to batter her skin with pinprick stings like the jellyfish kisses when she was a girl collecting what she mistook for sea quartz washed ashore. Those years, losing herself in the collecting, that’s what she hoped to recite now in every rhythm of her body, to focus so intensely on the task that the context fell away, only leaving in its wake the digging and eroded minerals and the child-sized achievements of discovery.

The few other people walking the shoreline wore shades of slate and khaki, blending in nearly seamlessly with their surroundings, a chameleon smoothness. They seemed cold and distant, the grayscale and sepia tones of a long-worn photograph with facial features faded away. The albums in the basement that her mother had so carefully curated from a hundred year’s artifacts, dated, arranged, book after book until it seemed there was no end... Willow could not prod at her most tender places right now thinking of that word, end. Instead, she thought of the surface. In royal violet and denim, contrasting the others, she was practically a tropic fish out of place in Rhode Island’s Atlantic waters. No one noticed her. In summers so many would walk the shore and set up towels and garish rainbow umbrellas along the way. But the winter solstice was two days’ past, and it had been months since unfamiliar feet had trespassed here.

As Willow glided forward, her ballet flats cracked the packed wet sand, the fractures spider-webbing along the surface. It left behind clumps like in the boxes of light brown sugar that her mother used to bake with every autumn. The air hung heavy with brine, and Willow swore that she could smell the quahogs beneath the waves. The tourists were always trying to block that scent out, grilling animal flesh and smoothing on sun lotion like mortar over bricks; they never wanted the actual experiences beyond the sand and the sun and the view, something inoffensive and interchangeable that they could’ve experienced anywhere along the east coast. 

The sand here, closer to the water, was more densely pocked with bits of quartz and amethyst. Willow bent over, her cardigan greeting the sand. She clawed with an infant’s grasping fingers, piercing the wave-crashed sand in what would look to an outsider to be a mindless frenzy. Willow, however, was very mindful—she knew exactly the kinds of pieces she was looking for. Finally, she came across the pink underbelly of a ribbed half-shell, its jagged umbo evidence of the trauma of its split. When she excavated it from its dreary beige tomb, she found that it had been cracked not only at the joint but also vertically, as though the absent shell half had taken with it half of this piece as well.

An imperfect half-shell was of no use to Willow. She tossed it, underhand, back to the water. The water was more than water. Her waves curled toward the sky in an openhearted gesture, then reached down toward the shore with an eager curiosity. The ocean was filled up with life—sea stars and octopi and invasive green crabs. Her mother had been an ocean, once, in a way that had somehow through the generations been proclaimed unremarkable on account of its seemingly natural inevitability, but it remained mystifying to Willow. 

The waves, famished, gnawed at her ankles, disturbing her thoughts. It wasn’t until the water drained back to the ocean that Willow simultaneously remembered she was wearing cloth shoes and realized that they were ruined beyond repair. Willow hopped, her feet heavy with oversaturated sand clinging in its attempts to cement her to the ground. And so she hopped again, this time feet slipping from shoes. Her leap brought her forward the equivalent of two steps. The shoes were behind her.

It was behind her.

She was behind her.

And maybe, Willow dared in the deepest chambers of herself still nursing irrational hope, if she didn’t turn around then the pillar of salt would not be waiting for her.

We’re all pillars of salt she had told Willow as a child. Her mother had lost count of how many times she’d read Slaughterhouse Five long before Willow was born. The copy in her study, torn on almost every edge and kissed with coffee stains, folded on almost every corner and scribbled in like a love letter, was never to be touched. She quoted it constantly, so much so that by age five Willow had felt as though she had read it herself. That copy now sat in the two-bedroom beach home that Willow rented year-round, tucked away behind an antique doll with red ringlets of synthetic hair so that Willow could only barely be reminded of its love-roughed edges.

Willow coiled around and found her flats, abandoned, under threat of further attack from the encroaching waves. She scooped up the shoes. They smelled so harshly of salt—pillars of salt, pillars of salt, mocking her like a cruel and demented bird out of a Poe story. They smelled so harshly of the salt that she almost pitched them as far into the sea as she could manage. One shoe happened to tilt to its side in Willow’s hand. She glared at its rebellion. Inside, she realized, a hermit crab, deep red exoskeleton and iridescent pearl of a shell to call home, had taken shelter. Heartbroken at what she had almost done, Willow plucked the crab from the toe of her shoe. She nested the flats under her arm as the crab pinched at her cuticles. Willow forgave each sting instantly; she knew what it was to be hurting, to be afraid, and reach for any sense of command over what happened next—that resistance to being pushed and pulled as though by the unknowable will of the waves.

She positioned the crab with care in a safe spot in the sand; in turn, he gave her a gesture of his claw that, had he fingers, would have been profane. She stood upright again, careful to walk in the direction opposite the hermit crab so as not to cause him harm. Staring at her own two feet as she moved, the sand consumed and then regurgitated them, again and again. A cycle. Like the waves. Like the moons. Like the rest.

With a sudden change in direction, Willow sprinted toward the ocean, to feel closer to it, even if it felt nothing in return. But then Willow found that it needed to feel something in return, that if it didn’t she might suddenly transform into a starburst with no one to witness. She knelt in the sand, knees of her jeans be damned. She couldn’t think about such frivolous, shallow things. Not now. Not when she felt so close to a breakthrough. A breakthrough to what, she did not know. But it was there, just under the surface. If she could only tease it out…

Digging. Her nails became claws, built for nothing but digging in the sand. She was pushed forward by a compulsion not quite her own. Digging. Digging. Cracking sand and piling sand. She found one empty half-shell, two. Each was unceremoniously lobbed into one of her shoes for future use; she was not gentle. After five, six, seven shells found themselves torn from Earth where it invited ocean, Willow felt the compulsion lift and air reenter her lungs, expand them, the pungent water stinging her eyes, bringing warmth to their corners.

Her lungs found rhythm again. Suddenly her toes felt pained from cold—and, in another instant, they went numb and she was forced to remember that she was in the heart of a New England winter. Willow flexed and wiggled her toes in attempt of shocking feeling back to skin and muscle and bone. She took the shell-filled shoes, cradling them to her chest as their contents clinked together like the dainty porcelain hands of China dolls. Her heart seemed to swell against her lungs and ribcage as she heard the music of the shells, the promise of the prayers that Willow would speak later lost against the steady lament of the waves that suddenly seemed so far away, nothing more than an echo.

***

Audrey T. Carroll is the author of Queen of Pentacles (Choose the Sword Press, 2016) and editor of Musing the Margins: Essays on Craft (Human/Kind Press, forthcoming). Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Prismatica Magazine, peculiar, Glass Poetry, Vagabond City, So to Speak, and others. She is a bisexual and disabled/chronically ill writer who serves as a Diversity & Inclusion Editor for the Journal of Creative Writing Studies. 
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Boneyard

By Claire Margaret Howe:

There are very few places I would happily spend the rest of eternity. The graveyard in Miobhaigh is one of them. It’s a stone’s throw from the seashore, lapped by the cold water of the north Atlantic. It sits squarely between the sea and the sky and on a sunny day it throws up a solid blue vista. The air is so clean that it is frequently thronged with midges, making it almost unliveable. It is surrounded on four sides by a dry-stone wall clad with lichen, ivy and a few flowering bushes. On the seaward side there is an accommodating dip in the wall that makes for a scenic seat. I like to sit there and watch small fishing boats trawl up and down checking their lobster pots. On a calm day the noises of busy work and conversational shouts carry up from the boats. In early autumn seals bask on the rocks at low tide and their occasional barks break the easy silence of the valley. Delicate sea pinks grow along the high tide mark. Strategically speaking, the graveyard is well placed to avoid surprises. Guarded on one side by a long stretch of sea, the east and western reaches are swathed in high grass and marshland. The occasional industrious beast grazes them; usually a donkey with an alarm call that reverberates for miles around. The sprawling brambles house birds that will alight noisily at the sight of any intruders. It is accessed only by a long, winding lane that twists steeply down the valley. The graveyard’s inhabitants – myself and the spirits – have ample opportunity to survey visitors before their arrival. 

This graveyard is very old. Local tradition puts it at ‘chomh sean leis an gceo agus nios sinne faoi dho’. Roughly translated, as old as the fog and twice as old again. Its earth is packed to capacity. It has been decommissioned as a burial ground, but exceptions are made. My grandmother is here, one of the last burials allowed. And my grandfather’s ashes – there was room for an urn, but not a coffin. Often, gravediggers would disturb an old grave, or unearth a coffin, or old bones. I remember hearing about occurrences of it as a child. It was never a cause for unnecessary ceremony. Coffins were re-buried. Bones were lifted from the ground, placed in a small sack and put to one side while the funeral of the day took place. After all the mourners had left, the old bones would be placed carefully alongside the new coffin, and the grave was filled. When the remains of several bodies were disturbed, they were grouped together and placed in one coffin. After decades of this practice, it was not unusual to open a coffin and find six or seven skulls. Once or twice, I have watched the gravediggers at work, silently sweating, and heard the rhythmic clink of spades on stony soil. The ground is treated with respect, but no solemn pomp or pageantry. It is a place of peaceful purpose. 

The graveyard is multi-denominational, much like death. It was used by every village and household for miles around. The deceased from across the peninsula were rowed over in currachs, traditional skin boats. There is a ‘coffin stone’ on the shore were the bodies rested before being carried to the grave. Surrounded by fishing villages, many of its inhabitants are victims of drowning. The locals believed that those who drowned lasted longer in the earth due to the salt in their bodies. The graveyard has seen epidemics and war and famine. There are hundreds of children buried here from the tuberculosis outbreaks in the 1900’s. Sitting on the wall watching the grass rustling over the graves, unwelcome thoughts must intrude. The southernmost corner is clear of headstones. This corner, not unique to this graveyard, is known as ‘the lonely corner’. Unchristened babies and suicide victims were not permitted on consecrated ground. Traumatised families, fearful of their lost ones spending an eternity in hell, would bribe clerics to bury their dead here. Buried at night, the graves weren’t marked, and the deceased were not spoken of again. This graveyard saw the rise and fall of Ireland’s booming trade in graverobbing in the 18th and 19th century. Fortunately, I can find no evidence to suggest that the trade disturbed the inhabitants of this soil. There would be little anonymity in small rural villages to protect graverobbers. It is comforting to think that for all the hardship my companions might have endured in life, they at least didn’t see this ignominy in death. This ground is, in all respects, a final resting place. 

Perhaps that’s why the graveyard is a peaceful place to sit and think. Here, where so many were committed to the earth, I am never lonely. Still, when I look at the unmarked corner and the flagstones where desperate people made offerings to a wealthy church, I can’t help but think that graveyards would be decidedly more pleasant without the oppressive religious overtones and the distressing histories. But then, I reason, they would be parks, and parks are often boring – with history as featureless as their lawns. This old boneyard has a history and a presence that will keep me sharp and keep me humble. I am happy to sit with these spirits, these old grafters. Soldiers, sailors, scholars. Crowded and muddled as they are, they have a quiet place to observe the fishing boats haul in their loads. Only the keening of the gulls to disturb them. 

***

Claire Margaret Howe is a freelance writer and mixed media artist based in Ireland. She divides her time between the sea and the hills and draws inspiration from both. She can be contacted at clairehowewriting@gmail.com

Little Dyke Beach

Photo: Anne Wyman

By Joel Robert Ferguson:

First off, let's say that which can
go without saying, that the stony
beach is not the stretch it once was,
when my legs were brief from ground
to body and I held the mouth 
of a broken shell to my ear 
and heard nothing.

It's a short walk to the beach house
the one we’d always then turn
back at, ever crunching over the pebbles,
blue and pink, that outline the upper
reaches of the inter-tidal, before we return
to the town, the county hospital, where
what must happen will happen.

Prairie kid, born Winnipegger,
downplaying the duress of Confusion Corner,
your feet in the Atlantic, if
the muck of the Minas Basin
at low tide can be called ocean.

It can, if
the roofs and new asphalt
where the old folks used
to lay out the dulse with its snails
drying in the sun (to hell with toxins) 

for sale or snack,
if that dredged-forest could be called land. 

It can.

***

Joel Robert Ferguson is the author of the poetry collection The Lost Cafeteria (2020, Signature Editions). He grew up in the Nova Scotian village of Bible Hill and now divides his time between Winnipeg and Montreal, where he is finishing his Masters in English Literature at Concordia University.

Hiraeth

Photo: jessica sealey

By Aoife Inman:

It’s late but the evening light lingers at the peripheries of the ocean making the day stretch long into the night. Time seems to stretch here, the minutes distorted by the quiet swell of the ocean.

The air is full of mist; it pads out the twilight zone between the last dregs of evening and the soft beginnings of the morning. I’ve always thought this is an almost mythical piece of the day, when it’s neither light nor dark and the sky is damp and thick with salt, brushed in off the incoming tide. You can hold the mist between your teeth, wads of it pressed against the insides of your cheeks like cotton.

There aren’t many who bother to come down to the sea front at this hour, with the weather, as it is, temperamental and unforgiving. The wind bites and scratches at any scrap of skin left bare to the element and my thighs are lined with small red welts and scratches – the claws of the ocean have dug their way into me, right to the bone. Today, however, there are a few faces who peer palely over in my direction as I trail down the hill – van dwellers, keen surfers and fishermen, who are all, themselves, half brine and barely human, at least in the city sense of the word.

This was always the place I felt most at home, not here specifically but this ocean, this crack of coastline that juts out obstinately, defiant and secluded. It feels a million mile away from the industrial powerhouse cities I’ve made my home now.

Home. It’s a strange word whose weight has always felt uncomfortable in my mouth, hard and bitter. I was born on the road, moving between a collection of cardboard houses, each one like the last and yet lacking something. I resided in houses, habitats, a series of rooms, plaster, mortar and board – safe and comfortable but never permanent. To belong to just one place strikes me as an exhausting concept.

I thought when I had grown up that I’d settle somewhere; that I’d stop moving and plant some roots, or whatever the metaphor is, but I’ve realised that those moments, those years spent on the road, they get into your bones over time. Slowly, you barely feel it at first, but I can’t stay still now. I’ve tried, time and time again, found a place I love and settled there with a job and a plan and a circle of friends and then I feel that itch, again, against the soles of my feet. It’s like a disease, that itch, that want for change, it’s exhausting sometimes.

I walk along the cliff path, away from the cove, to the world’s edge where the grassy slope seems to fall away into the deafening blue. It’s a steep rocky path carved right into the grit and soil of the cliff, the sort that has been etched by many pairs of feet, worn over many years. When the tide eventually comes in it will cut off this path completely, a void of cold, blue Atlantic filling the space where my feet have trod. Nothing about the breadth or surface of this terrain is easily digestible. It’s a wholegrain, bran and fibre sort of landscape – some find it lonely, harsh, and unforgiving – I find myself falling in love with the rough corners of it every time I return.

When I was a child we were taught to spot currents on cliffs like this, our hands tracing the motions of the sea, trailing the lines of white foam that spread across the ocean like a film. I reach out my hand to lay it on the horizon, palm obscuring the bulb of the grey sun.

If you follow the cliff path round the curling edge of the peninsula you reach a town, a knot of tangled streets that overlap one another like old strings, every one gnarled with potholes and cobbles. I follow it now, zigzagging through kissing gates and through fields of thick grass. Everything is further apart here, houses and gardens stretch along the street, sand banks drag the beaches way out into the bay and the years seem to trickle by – I do not have to measure time so carefully here, there are months to spare.

The town is simple, a harbour filled with thin fishing boats and crab pots, a lifeboat house, a shop selling spades and 99 cones. It’s fixed in another time, another era where people worked with their hands, in the earth and the water.

This place is filled with mysticism, steeped in folklore, luck bound in rhymes and patterns of three. It’s everywhere you look, tucked in corners of woodland and thin waterfalls where faerie stacks topple. Down in the town the boats that jut out into the cove are named after mythical lands and magical creatures, suspicion has wormed its way amongst the men who tend the land and drag the sea.

“Look down there.” The mother leans into the clove of her son’s ear as she speaks. “Look down at that boat there, see the lions on its side?”

Sure enough, on its flanks are painted two yellow lions, their manes dipping and rising out of the green waters.

“They’re named after the legend of Lyonnesse…legend says there used to be a beautiful isle just set above Seven Stones reef that is halfway out to the Scillies. The city of lions and the land of Lyonesse, built with 140 churches atop it and a castle they say, all swallowed up in a single night by the ocean.”

The boy’s eyes widens as he listens, his hands gripping the handrails with his chubby palms.

His mother crouches down by his side, “look now do you see the top of the steeple there, just jutting out of the waves?”

He nods, eyes fixed on the grey sea.

The light is fading now, obscuring the edges of the day. Home, it’s a strange thing I think again, I wrap my tongue around it, a lump in the hollow of my mouth. It’s everywhere here and yet it feels distant. It’s in the lilt of the mother’s curling accent, the one I have lost over so many years spent away. It’s in each vowel, full bodied and warm, the crackle of pebbles under rubber boots in the evening tide, the low thud of water turning cliff to rubble.

I collect them in my palms as I count them, feel the weight of the love I hold for this place, and close my eyes as the day melts.

About the author:
Aoife Inman is a writer and historian based between Cornwall and Manchester. Her short stories have been published in Electric Reads’ Young Writers Anthology 2017 and New Binary Press’ 2018 Autonomy collection, as well as being long-listed for the 2016 Royal Academy Short Story Award.