[story] for those by the sea
author: nekokoban (nekokoban)
email: nekokoban [at] gmail.com
Along a certain stretch of beach, in the rocky, sandy soil where only the scrubbiest of grass can grow, you may find a certain flower during the short weeks of early spring. Each blossom is about the size of an infant's curled fist and each of the five petals is teardrop-shaped and white as fresh snow. There is no other place in the whole wide world where these flowers grow, though you may search for the whole of your life. The locals call these flowers ash-tears and venerate them as a symbol of fidelity.
It is said that these flowers sprang from the tears of a maiden who spent the entirety of her short life waiting by the beach for her brother to return from the ocean - that he sailed out on a clear bright day to fish and did not return, though the water had remained glass-smooth and calm from pale morning to red evening. For many years she waited, faithful to the only family she had in the world, until one morning, the people of their village awoke to find her lying in the middle of her own miniature sea of flowers. It was said that as a friend approached her to confirm her brother's death, her entire body turned to sand and blew away with the wind, leaving only her tears behind.
So it was that in this place, it was decided, a watch-tower would be built to serve as a guide for all those who might stray upon the ocean, day or night - a tower that stretched all the way to the heavens, with the ashes of the flowers mixed into the mortar laid between the bricks: a tower built to last until doomsday and beyond.
On Tuesday Cecilia went looking for sea shells.
She walked down from her grandmother's house to the ocean, picking her barefoot way across rocks and sand until she reached the water's edge. Before she stepped into the shallow ankle-deep waves, she paused to roll up each pant leg up to mid-calf. The water was nearly as warm as the air and felt good on her bare skin. She kept her eyes downcast, picking out shapes through the clear water. When anything in particular caught her eye, she bent and fished it out, dropping it into the battered plastic bucket she brought specifically for these expeditions. They made wet dull thunking noises, which gradually became wet slapping sounds as the pail began to fill.
Cecilia liked to walk the length of the beach until she reached the lighthouse and her grandmother's house was nothing more than a dark smudge in the distance. No one lived in this lighthouse any more - the port that had once been here had closed, and a new lighthouse opened further up the beach, closer to where her grandmother and other people lived - and the door always hung just slightly ajar, swinging open a little wider each time Cecilia visited. Cobwebs and debris littered the inside, when you peeked through the cracks.
On Tuesday the door was open just wide enough for someone small to squeeze through. Cecilia put her bucket of shells down and got onto her hands and knees. She slipped her arms through first, then her head, then wriggled the rest of her body in to follow. Once inside, she leaned against the stuck door and grabbed her bucket of shells to pull it inside as well. It got caught at the gap, and no matter how much she tugged, she couldn't get it through. She gave up on the bucket and took the three prettiest shells from it and stuck them into her pockets. Sometimes other people came out this way - she'd seen their footsteps, once in a rare while, in the white sand - and she didn't want anyone to take her favorites. Then she got to her feet and looked around.
There was a long dark board that lay against the far wall of the lighthouse and a thick layer of dust on the floor. The spiral stairs set in the center of the tower were dark and narrow. From somewhere high above, thin shafts of light worked their way down and grew murky when they reached the depths where Cecilia stood. She tipped her head back as far as she could without losing her balance, but she couldn't see to the top, so she put one hand in her pocket to keep a hold of her saved shells and put the other on the thin metal bannister of the stairs, and began to work her way up. The sounds of the ocean were muffled from a constant murmuring rush to a low dull roar. Her feet made soft tapping noises and left clear prints in the dust.
As she made her way up the stairs, she began to hear voices.
At first she thought it was maybe just a song stuck in her head - her grandmother had been listening to the radio that morning while making breakfast - and then she started to listen. It was a woman singing, her voice nearly lost in the sound of the waves, which grew stronger the higher Cecilia went. The words were in no language Cecilia had ever heard before, and they were high and sweet and sad. Every now and then, she thought she caught brief snatches of words that she knew until they strung together into nearly complete phrases.
Cecilia climbed.
She stood by the ocean and watched as her brother put his pack into his small fishing-boat, the sun bright in his hair and his eyes, and she had to squint and shield her own gaze in order to see him at all. Dressed in white in the noonday heat, he glowed like a polished gemstone. He hummed as he worked, a fishing-song, a luck-song, a prayer for the waves to be calm and the fish to be fat and lazy for his nets. When he looked up and saw her, he laughed and waved and called her name, so she could not pretend that her attention was elsewhere. She picked her way down to his side.
"The soothsayer says there will be a storm tonight," she said. "He has said today is not a good day for fishing, or to be upon the ocean at all. Come home."
And her brother threw his head back and laughed at that, loud enough to startle seabirds into flight. "But the sky is so clear now!" he said. "The ocean looks like it goes on forever; do you see any waves?"
She had to admit she did not.
"There are no clouds in the sky, either. And everyone else is afraid of the warnings from the storm-walkers, so they'll waste this entire day in their homes. In the meantime, there are fish that will be careless because there is no fleet of boats to make them cautious. Now is the best time to go, so I will."
Cecilia stopped walking. She put her hand against the stone wall, which felt both rough and damp under her fingers. She had to knuckle at both eyes with her free hand. They ached now with a peculiar double-vision. When she looked up again, she saw a small square window cut into the wall just a little above her, so she climbed those last few stairs to it and stretched up onto her toes to look outside. Before her, she could see the wide rolling expanse of ocean that looked like it spread out into infinity. A flock of seagulls cut across the sky from out over the waves, their shrill voices ringing in the air, and inside the tower, the woman continued to sing.
She braced her hands against the edge of the window and pushed herself up until she could rest her chest and belly against the flat of the windowsill. Once braced, she looked down to the bottom of the tower and the sand and scrub far below. The height made her a little dizzy, but she continued to hang in place for a few minutes longer, looking first down, then up, then down again. Before she moved off the window, she rolled to be partially on her side to try and see her way up the tower; from her position, she guessed she was only maybe halfway up.
With a little grunt, Cecilia pushed herself off the window ledge. Her belly scraped against the rough stone, and she grabbed at it again to steady herself. She patted her pockets to make sure her shells were still in place, then continued her trek up the stairs.
So it was: nothing else she could say would sway her brother, so she remained silent and watched as he finished the last of his preparations. He set his hands on the sides of the boat and pushed, following its thrust out into the water, then swung himself into it. He paused only to wave to her once more, then turned his face to the horizon; and she just watched, her fingers laced together so tightly they ached, until he was simply a dark speck on the water, too far out for her to do more than make out the basic shape of a man in a boat. When an hour passed and the sky remained clear and bright, she turned and went back to the home they shared: her, her brother, and their old grandmother, who slept through the hottest part of the day and lurked in the shadows at night, weaving straw dolls to be sold at the market.
She went home and started with her mending: the rough clothes that all three of them wore, the spare nets that her brother had not brought out with him, the arrows that she used to hunt during the transitional seasons, when animals strayed down as far as their village in search of food, water, or safe spaces to rest. It was work that her fingers had long since memorized, but work that still needed her attention, especially the nets, which required retying in some places and new twine in others. She didn't sing, because it disturbed her grandmother's rest. The entire day passed in this quiet manner, but as the sun was setting and the light growing dim, her needle jabbed through her brother's sleeve and into her finger. She jerked her hand away and watched as a drop of blood welled up and fell on the yellowed white of the shirt in her hands. It spread in a small lopsided pattern.
There came a knock at the door. She looked up, but did not answer right away, until there came another knock, and her brother's voice: "Dear sister, the soothsayer was wrong. I have caught so many fish that I cannot carry them all myself. Come with me and help me."
To that, she said, "I am not yet finished with my own work. Fetch the fish yourself, that is your job."
Another knock came at the door, hard enough to cause it to rattle on its hinges. "Dear sister, the oceans are rolling with fish, and it's a sight to see! Come and see it, and help me carry the fish."
She looked at her finger and the dried smear of blood on her skin. The drop that had fallen onto her brother's sleeve had turned black in the fading rays of the sun's light. "I am not yet finished with my own work," she said. "Fetch the fish yourself, that is your job."
A third knock answered her, and this time the door bent a little, letting in small patches of light. The smell of wet rot came like a slap to the face, sudden and sharp enough to make her stomach turn. She did not move from her kneeling position. "Dear sister, there is enough fish to feed the two of us for the rest of our lives, even if we should live to be older than Grandmother. But they will all escape if you don't come help me!"
She blinked hard and found her eyes swimming with tears. "I am not yet finished with my own work. Fetch the fish yourself, that is your job."
It felt like Cecilia had been walking for hours. Sweat dripped into her eyes and her breath came in sharp gasping little pants and her legs ached like they were on fire. She couldn't stop, though - every time she hesitated and thought of turning back, something in her stomach twisted. The skin there already felt tender from the earlier scrape, so that when she touched it, to try and rub some comfort in, her belly flinched away from the contact. Her throat ached from her breathing. The woman's song had grown louder as she'd climbed higher, until it sounded as if the words were being sung directly into her ear, but their meaning continued to elude her. A part of her felt, oddly, like she should apologize for that.
Finally, though, she saw the top of the lighthouse just above her. As if that itself was a trigger, she found herself finally able to stop, and once she did, her knees buckled until she hit the steps with them. She rested her hands on her thighs and curled them into fists. I don't understand, she wanted to say, but couldn't get the breath for it. She blinked hard and then rubbed the back of one hand over her eyes. I don't understand.
Cecilia got to her feet. She put one hand to the wall and used that as a support to climb the last ten stairs, one dragging foot at a time.
In the morning, without having slept at all the night before, she went down to the water. She followed the trail of dried sea-grasses to the ocean, where her brother's destroyed boat lay. It looked as if some angry giant had chopped downwards with one hand and splintered the craft in half. Lodged under part of the wreckage was the basket her brother used to keep fish. The lid was long gone, but a single fish still lay inside. Its one eye was milky and filmed over.
She bent and turned the basket right-side up and tipped the fish to the bottom of it. On top of that she put her brother's mended shirt and a loaf of bread taken from the cupboard before her grandmother had noticed. Over that she put two branches of dried rosemary. Then she took it and walked into the ocean, until the warm water was up to her thighs. She took a deep breath, then twisted her body and flung the basket out into the ocean. It spun as it flew, then touched down with a quiet splash. For a few moments it simply bobbed in place, and simply sank out of sight like a stone, bubbling the whole time.
She watched until it was gone, then turned and walked back home.
Cecilia opened the door to the top of the lighthouse and found herself standing in complete silence. There was a wind strong enough to make her eyes sting and whip her hair, but she couldn't hear any of it. The song had ended.
She walked to the edge of the lighthouse and knelt down, leaning forward just enough to look down.
From the top of the tower, it didn't seem as tall as it had from a distance, or even from the inside. Cecilia sank down further, onto her belly, and leaned her chin out over the edge.
In the scrubby, sickly grass growing at the base of the lighthouse, white flowers were blooming.
email: nekokoban [at] gmail.com
Along a certain stretch of beach, in the rocky, sandy soil where only the scrubbiest of grass can grow, you may find a certain flower during the short weeks of early spring. Each blossom is about the size of an infant's curled fist and each of the five petals is teardrop-shaped and white as fresh snow. There is no other place in the whole wide world where these flowers grow, though you may search for the whole of your life. The locals call these flowers ash-tears and venerate them as a symbol of fidelity.
It is said that these flowers sprang from the tears of a maiden who spent the entirety of her short life waiting by the beach for her brother to return from the ocean - that he sailed out on a clear bright day to fish and did not return, though the water had remained glass-smooth and calm from pale morning to red evening. For many years she waited, faithful to the only family she had in the world, until one morning, the people of their village awoke to find her lying in the middle of her own miniature sea of flowers. It was said that as a friend approached her to confirm her brother's death, her entire body turned to sand and blew away with the wind, leaving only her tears behind.
So it was that in this place, it was decided, a watch-tower would be built to serve as a guide for all those who might stray upon the ocean, day or night - a tower that stretched all the way to the heavens, with the ashes of the flowers mixed into the mortar laid between the bricks: a tower built to last until doomsday and beyond.
On Tuesday Cecilia went looking for sea shells.
She walked down from her grandmother's house to the ocean, picking her barefoot way across rocks and sand until she reached the water's edge. Before she stepped into the shallow ankle-deep waves, she paused to roll up each pant leg up to mid-calf. The water was nearly as warm as the air and felt good on her bare skin. She kept her eyes downcast, picking out shapes through the clear water. When anything in particular caught her eye, she bent and fished it out, dropping it into the battered plastic bucket she brought specifically for these expeditions. They made wet dull thunking noises, which gradually became wet slapping sounds as the pail began to fill.
Cecilia liked to walk the length of the beach until she reached the lighthouse and her grandmother's house was nothing more than a dark smudge in the distance. No one lived in this lighthouse any more - the port that had once been here had closed, and a new lighthouse opened further up the beach, closer to where her grandmother and other people lived - and the door always hung just slightly ajar, swinging open a little wider each time Cecilia visited. Cobwebs and debris littered the inside, when you peeked through the cracks.
On Tuesday the door was open just wide enough for someone small to squeeze through. Cecilia put her bucket of shells down and got onto her hands and knees. She slipped her arms through first, then her head, then wriggled the rest of her body in to follow. Once inside, she leaned against the stuck door and grabbed her bucket of shells to pull it inside as well. It got caught at the gap, and no matter how much she tugged, she couldn't get it through. She gave up on the bucket and took the three prettiest shells from it and stuck them into her pockets. Sometimes other people came out this way - she'd seen their footsteps, once in a rare while, in the white sand - and she didn't want anyone to take her favorites. Then she got to her feet and looked around.
There was a long dark board that lay against the far wall of the lighthouse and a thick layer of dust on the floor. The spiral stairs set in the center of the tower were dark and narrow. From somewhere high above, thin shafts of light worked their way down and grew murky when they reached the depths where Cecilia stood. She tipped her head back as far as she could without losing her balance, but she couldn't see to the top, so she put one hand in her pocket to keep a hold of her saved shells and put the other on the thin metal bannister of the stairs, and began to work her way up. The sounds of the ocean were muffled from a constant murmuring rush to a low dull roar. Her feet made soft tapping noises and left clear prints in the dust.
As she made her way up the stairs, she began to hear voices.
At first she thought it was maybe just a song stuck in her head - her grandmother had been listening to the radio that morning while making breakfast - and then she started to listen. It was a woman singing, her voice nearly lost in the sound of the waves, which grew stronger the higher Cecilia went. The words were in no language Cecilia had ever heard before, and they were high and sweet and sad. Every now and then, she thought she caught brief snatches of words that she knew until they strung together into nearly complete phrases.
Cecilia climbed.
She stood by the ocean and watched as her brother put his pack into his small fishing-boat, the sun bright in his hair and his eyes, and she had to squint and shield her own gaze in order to see him at all. Dressed in white in the noonday heat, he glowed like a polished gemstone. He hummed as he worked, a fishing-song, a luck-song, a prayer for the waves to be calm and the fish to be fat and lazy for his nets. When he looked up and saw her, he laughed and waved and called her name, so she could not pretend that her attention was elsewhere. She picked her way down to his side.
"The soothsayer says there will be a storm tonight," she said. "He has said today is not a good day for fishing, or to be upon the ocean at all. Come home."
And her brother threw his head back and laughed at that, loud enough to startle seabirds into flight. "But the sky is so clear now!" he said. "The ocean looks like it goes on forever; do you see any waves?"
She had to admit she did not.
"There are no clouds in the sky, either. And everyone else is afraid of the warnings from the storm-walkers, so they'll waste this entire day in their homes. In the meantime, there are fish that will be careless because there is no fleet of boats to make them cautious. Now is the best time to go, so I will."
Cecilia stopped walking. She put her hand against the stone wall, which felt both rough and damp under her fingers. She had to knuckle at both eyes with her free hand. They ached now with a peculiar double-vision. When she looked up again, she saw a small square window cut into the wall just a little above her, so she climbed those last few stairs to it and stretched up onto her toes to look outside. Before her, she could see the wide rolling expanse of ocean that looked like it spread out into infinity. A flock of seagulls cut across the sky from out over the waves, their shrill voices ringing in the air, and inside the tower, the woman continued to sing.
She braced her hands against the edge of the window and pushed herself up until she could rest her chest and belly against the flat of the windowsill. Once braced, she looked down to the bottom of the tower and the sand and scrub far below. The height made her a little dizzy, but she continued to hang in place for a few minutes longer, looking first down, then up, then down again. Before she moved off the window, she rolled to be partially on her side to try and see her way up the tower; from her position, she guessed she was only maybe halfway up.
With a little grunt, Cecilia pushed herself off the window ledge. Her belly scraped against the rough stone, and she grabbed at it again to steady herself. She patted her pockets to make sure her shells were still in place, then continued her trek up the stairs.
So it was: nothing else she could say would sway her brother, so she remained silent and watched as he finished the last of his preparations. He set his hands on the sides of the boat and pushed, following its thrust out into the water, then swung himself into it. He paused only to wave to her once more, then turned his face to the horizon; and she just watched, her fingers laced together so tightly they ached, until he was simply a dark speck on the water, too far out for her to do more than make out the basic shape of a man in a boat. When an hour passed and the sky remained clear and bright, she turned and went back to the home they shared: her, her brother, and their old grandmother, who slept through the hottest part of the day and lurked in the shadows at night, weaving straw dolls to be sold at the market.
She went home and started with her mending: the rough clothes that all three of them wore, the spare nets that her brother had not brought out with him, the arrows that she used to hunt during the transitional seasons, when animals strayed down as far as their village in search of food, water, or safe spaces to rest. It was work that her fingers had long since memorized, but work that still needed her attention, especially the nets, which required retying in some places and new twine in others. She didn't sing, because it disturbed her grandmother's rest. The entire day passed in this quiet manner, but as the sun was setting and the light growing dim, her needle jabbed through her brother's sleeve and into her finger. She jerked her hand away and watched as a drop of blood welled up and fell on the yellowed white of the shirt in her hands. It spread in a small lopsided pattern.
There came a knock at the door. She looked up, but did not answer right away, until there came another knock, and her brother's voice: "Dear sister, the soothsayer was wrong. I have caught so many fish that I cannot carry them all myself. Come with me and help me."
To that, she said, "I am not yet finished with my own work. Fetch the fish yourself, that is your job."
Another knock came at the door, hard enough to cause it to rattle on its hinges. "Dear sister, the oceans are rolling with fish, and it's a sight to see! Come and see it, and help me carry the fish."
She looked at her finger and the dried smear of blood on her skin. The drop that had fallen onto her brother's sleeve had turned black in the fading rays of the sun's light. "I am not yet finished with my own work," she said. "Fetch the fish yourself, that is your job."
A third knock answered her, and this time the door bent a little, letting in small patches of light. The smell of wet rot came like a slap to the face, sudden and sharp enough to make her stomach turn. She did not move from her kneeling position. "Dear sister, there is enough fish to feed the two of us for the rest of our lives, even if we should live to be older than Grandmother. But they will all escape if you don't come help me!"
She blinked hard and found her eyes swimming with tears. "I am not yet finished with my own work. Fetch the fish yourself, that is your job."
It felt like Cecilia had been walking for hours. Sweat dripped into her eyes and her breath came in sharp gasping little pants and her legs ached like they were on fire. She couldn't stop, though - every time she hesitated and thought of turning back, something in her stomach twisted. The skin there already felt tender from the earlier scrape, so that when she touched it, to try and rub some comfort in, her belly flinched away from the contact. Her throat ached from her breathing. The woman's song had grown louder as she'd climbed higher, until it sounded as if the words were being sung directly into her ear, but their meaning continued to elude her. A part of her felt, oddly, like she should apologize for that.
Finally, though, she saw the top of the lighthouse just above her. As if that itself was a trigger, she found herself finally able to stop, and once she did, her knees buckled until she hit the steps with them. She rested her hands on her thighs and curled them into fists. I don't understand, she wanted to say, but couldn't get the breath for it. She blinked hard and then rubbed the back of one hand over her eyes. I don't understand.
Cecilia got to her feet. She put one hand to the wall and used that as a support to climb the last ten stairs, one dragging foot at a time.
In the morning, without having slept at all the night before, she went down to the water. She followed the trail of dried sea-grasses to the ocean, where her brother's destroyed boat lay. It looked as if some angry giant had chopped downwards with one hand and splintered the craft in half. Lodged under part of the wreckage was the basket her brother used to keep fish. The lid was long gone, but a single fish still lay inside. Its one eye was milky and filmed over.
She bent and turned the basket right-side up and tipped the fish to the bottom of it. On top of that she put her brother's mended shirt and a loaf of bread taken from the cupboard before her grandmother had noticed. Over that she put two branches of dried rosemary. Then she took it and walked into the ocean, until the warm water was up to her thighs. She took a deep breath, then twisted her body and flung the basket out into the ocean. It spun as it flew, then touched down with a quiet splash. For a few moments it simply bobbed in place, and simply sank out of sight like a stone, bubbling the whole time.
She watched until it was gone, then turned and walked back home.
Cecilia opened the door to the top of the lighthouse and found herself standing in complete silence. There was a wind strong enough to make her eyes sting and whip her hair, but she couldn't hear any of it. The song had ended.
She walked to the edge of the lighthouse and knelt down, leaning forward just enough to look down.
From the top of the tower, it didn't seem as tall as it had from a distance, or even from the inside. Cecilia sank down further, onto her belly, and leaned her chin out over the edge.
In the scrubby, sickly grass growing at the base of the lighthouse, white flowers were blooming.