At Ocean's Mercy
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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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