THE SHROUDS LEAN INTO THE SITE OF IMPACT -
breaking light into diagonals and planes. one might fail to notice a hull amid the frozen waves.
The water is wrong here.
Locust doesn’t need to step into it to know that it is wrong, because fearful or not, she has a sailor’s eye - wrong, wrong, wrong in a way that makes her stomach curl and her eyes ache enough to make her head pound. There is something about it that is hard to look at directly, and it is not just the bright sheen of sunlight against the glossy blue, which seems to her to have no depth, like it has been painted on; something is wrong, and it is like a haze, covering the sea so that passer-by cannot see what lies beneath. (Not sand, she thinks, grimly, and certainly not water. It is a thin veneer, a shroud…)
She stays away from the surf, her hooves dug into the pale (pleasing, on the approach, but sickly on arrival) sand. Statuesque – metallic. Her coat catches like something made of silver in the afternoon sun, and, despite the sweat dripping dark trails down her sides and face, she does not move, just trains her squinted gaze on the water, as though she can hope to discern what lies beneath the idea of water. The heat is dizzying, out in the sun, with barely a breeze to interrupt it, but she is accustomed to it, from days on days at sea; but she is unnerved, and she can’t shake the feeling that she should run before the island can reveal itself for what it is, whatever it is. The bridge was too long. (She knows the distance between the island and the mainland. It was too long, and you should be able to see the opposite shore from the edge of it.) Even the water feels like an illusion, though she knows it extends back to the shore and near-endlessly in the other direction.
Her mouth is dry. The scent of salt water is mingled with something subtle, beneath it – like some cold undercurrent. Rotten fish, she thinks, it smells like rotten fish. But the scent is too subtle, like she is downwind and hundreds of feet away, and rotten fish are always pungent, if you are close enough to smell them. There is nothing on the pristine shoreline, and there are no dead things bobbing in the waves; she turns, momentarily, towards the woods, and the sharp-toothed birds that inhabit the branches, searching for a glint of silver in their fangs. After a moment, she looks back, her brow furrowed, towards the tide, which creeps closer with each passing moment. (She has not been here long enough to know if it swallows the shore entirely at its height, but it seems to be encroaching at dangerous speeds.) The birds wouldn’t be eating rotting fish anyways – there were plenty of living things to hunt in the waves and in the brush, and they didn’t have the look of scavengers about them.
A few others pass by her, laughing and chatting easily, side by side. (They look like young lovers, Locust thinks, with the most distant twinge of something akin to bitterness. (She, of course, tells herself that it is because she is no longer particularly young.) A smiling girl, with her long curls of red hair, and the speckled man that she is nudging, nearly ghosting her lips against the curve of his jaw; she is wearing those dark, oil-spill flowers in her hair.) There are a few other figures, spread out along the coast. The old man with a necklace of teeth – shark teeth? – who seems to be scouring the shoreline for more. A little girl with wings and a pair of curling horns that is nosing at a crab, which keeps snapping at her in turn. (She giggles. Locust wonders where her mother is; a girl so young should not be on her own.) A melancholic bay woman, with wild tangles of hair that extend to drag the ground, who stands like a wooden statue in the surf, staring out in the distance – towards the nonexistent shoreline of the Terminus, which cannot even be seen as a strip banding the horizon. A man with too many teeth and a pair of antlers, staring at the birds with a predatory gleam in his grey-glass eyes. Though they must be close, for her to make out so many details, she feels like she is a thousand miles away from them, and there is a strange buzzing between her ears, like a swarm of insects has taken root inside of her skull.
She looks back at the water, and she sucks in a gasp. For a moment, the ocean is not blue – it is the dark red-violet of wine, and the sand is not white but grey and full of jagged black rocks, like obsidian spines. Dead fish float belly-up in the water, along with beached jellyfish, bleached blood-red by the water, and sharks, and an octopus, and, in the distance, she thinks she sees a whale…and there are terrible things clawing at the shore, trying to pull themselves out of the water. With beaks. And – too many tentacles to count. Sharp claws. A thing with massive, jagged fins cuts through the deep water, and the fin seems impossibly large to her, even from a distance. Too big to imagine the size of the creature that possesses it. The sky, too, feels angry and red, and the sun is lurid and dark, the clouds an angry dash of orange that hang heavy and full on the horizon, cracked open by violent streaks of lightning…
But she blinks, and the image is gone, leaving her with nothing but the shudder of her spine and the pungent, nauseating scent of rot.
She tries to find humor in it, because she isn’t so sure that she didn’t just witness the end of the world, hiding somewhere beneath the waves. A trick of the light, maybe, or another strange thing about this island, which is already more than strange enough.
Or maybe she just drank too much last night.
@open! || lowkey inspired by The Time Machine tbh|| "sea of ice," callie siskel [title is from "like a scratchy record," alice notley]
"Speech!" ||
