I NEEDED TO BE SOMEWHERE DIFFERENT
maybe I needed to be someone different, too

"M
ind yer 'ooves," grunted the shipyard boy, as a barrel of silver mackerel, freshly netted, thumped down upon the dock. 

Messalina peered abashedly into his freckled frown and stepped quickly aside. "Sorry," she whispered, jerking her nose away from the symphony of gills heaving open and shut, silver peeling to red, as if queasy from the sight. 

The boy shrugged, slapped a diving seagull casually from the air with a wooden oar, and muttered, "S'okay. Din't want yer cloak dirtied, 's all."

"It's okay," she echoed, smiling faintly. "It's an old one." Hesitantly, she pulled down her hood and showed him the slash of crooked stitches keeping it attached to the rest of the thick, homespun wool. It was a crude thing, but it kept her warm. 

Nothing else was able to do that anymore. 

Swallowing, and suddenly made conscious of how silly it was to show a stranger her tattered clothing, Messalina threw her hood back over her head before the boy could notice what she'd been trying to hide. 

Her shadowed gaze slipped almost guiltily back to the gasping fish. "May I - " she looked away, then, towards the blackness of the autumn sea. Moon-pulled waves (for it was not yet blue dawn) splashed gently against the pilings, slicking the walk with salty spray. "May I buy one?" 

The boy's roughly carved brows furrowed. They didn't normally sell on the docks, before the fish had been gutted and cleaned and bathed in sheets of ice. Wasn't proper procedure, his pa would say, grunting three times for emphasis. But who was he to deny a lady her fish? 

Besides, times were hard for everyone. Her copper could buy a loaf of hot bread from Talan's, to bring home to his ma and sisters.

"'Course," he chirped, mind made. He peered curiously down at her hooded face, before adding quickly, "Copper'a piece, they be." She nodded, and a copper coin appeared from the folds of her cloak. "Just one, then, please."

When the boy handed her the fish, wrapped in crinkly brown paper, she took it gingerly and kept it a fair distance away from her nose. He thought little of it. Townsfolk - especially ones with hocks as thin and delicate as hers - were funny like that. 

Though, when she turned away after whispering a soft thank-you-and-good-day, he could almost swear he saw her ice blue eyes flash a muddied scarlet. Like... the sea after whaling day, when blood stained the waters - and his limbs - red for hours and hours. 

He shook his head, and knocked another bomb-diving seagull away from his barrel of fish. Pa always said he had a wild imagination. So, to prove his pa wrong, he thought little of it.

----
When Messalina was a fair distance across the beach, when there was not a soul alive for miles on either end of her, when her hunger coiled so tightly in her stomach she almost gasped, she unwrapped the fish carefully from its paper, brought its weakly twitching tail to her lips, and screwed shut her eyes.

When she opened her eyes, she dug a hole in the sand with her hoof and placed the bones she could not swallow inside. She did not stay to watch the sea reclaim them whole.

As she walked slowly down the sand, she looked towards the hulking form of the ship setting sail for Delumine. There was still time, too much of it; the ship did not sail until midday. Should she pass her hours in the markets? Visit the local bakeries? Stroll along the beach and crack the oysters for pearls? 

These should have been the questions she pondered. Hazy, insubstantial questions, where the answers mattered not so much as the simple act of asking. Of considering. 

She no longer had such luxuries. To consider. 

Instead, she hungered. And hunger could not be considered. Hunger scratched its nails down the walls, smashed its fists through the windows, pushed its face through shards of glass and screamed: it is not enough! 

What she was learning, was that it would never be enough.

☾