Category: Short stories

51°45’16” N 4°29’12” W

Making

The day we died felt odd, deceptive. It was disorientating to say the least. Though by that point, none of us really cared what was happening. For some time, the tides had felt thicker and sluggish, the sea had become something else. Something strange.  We were dazed, as used as we were to the tidal whims of our home, this felt different, it crept up on us sideways and left us confused. Life continued in a fashion – we fed but with no great urgency or joy, just opened our mouths and let in the not so nourishing waters. An act that felt so normal and, at the same time, so very different. We continued as long as the burnished light rippled through the glas water. But by the time the light had shifted and lost its golden hue we knew that something was wrong: a part of us had been ebbing away, a drop at a time, but for how long we weren’t sure, as if we had been slowly pouring some vital part of ourselves into the veridian tides.

By the time the light completely disappeared, we were all dead. 

We sank to the ocean floor, shells cracked or chipped as they hit the bottom. Our soft parts started to wither, revealing bone. Some of us were broken apart and what little remained was scooped up by a band of desperate heliwrs. We don’t think we gave them much sustenance: a group of them are on the other side of the hill. Listen to us, “the Hill,” apologies we are getting ahead of ourselves, we’ll get to that bit in a moment. Many of us fell on that day and the days that followed. Layer after layer and slowly, inevitably, our world calcified becoming something quite, quite different. We came to know a new way of being – the way of stone.

Where once there had been the soothing ebb and flow our world we were now rigid, static, and seemingly lifeless. We were prisoners held under ossuary guard, hardening and strengthening with the passing of the ages. Yet our awareness seeped out into the strata, permeating the solidity surrounding us, we slowly came to a new understanding in the darkness. An understanding that we were utterly alone in the rock. An understanding that hungry forces churned and kneaded what lay beneath us, moulding it to its own ends.

All we could do was wait.

Listen, can you hear that?

The rain is coming down again. Softly, like that song Ben and I once danced to, the soft crackle of needle on vinyl, whispers from the past. I can feel the early waters swelling, clean and fresh, rising up to greet us with silver finned cheer. Just like every morning on the water. It arrives with promises, with hints flashing in the depths and whispers riding in on the currents. It is reliable, dependable, predictable as an ancient clock tick, tick, ticking away in a forgotten school hall, a faithful and reliable old care taker. That dry and dusty hall, where I first saw Ben’s awkward smile and dreamed of holding his hand, has long since welcomed the lap, lap, lapping of the waves.

I can hear the young fisher men, their banter boldly bristling back and forth along the quayside flashing and bright, like the fish they hope to catch on the hooks that they’re now casting into the deep waters.