Forget the Sleepless Shores

by Sonya Taaffe

  The skin around her eyes looks crushed with exhaustion, sallow. Through water and the crab’s clambering legs, he watches her hand shake as she pushes wind-raveled hair back from her face; the backs of her hands scratched over and over with red and healing lines, as though she plunged them into a thornbush, or the brittle maze of coral. One fingernail is blackened. His fingernails will fall like shells and the sand cover them over.

  Her voice comes as clearly to his brain as the touch of a lionfish’s spine. The cries of the gulls were never so insistent. As always, as ritually, she says, “Tell me what you’ve seen.”

  **

  Her house stands up on the dunes, in the labyrinth of saltgrass and beach roses that sway and ripple in the constant wind from the sea. Your shoes grate on the old walkway that the sand has nearly drifted over, until you must kick at the ground every few steps to find it; the white slat fence has sagged into the sand, spilled down to the ground here and there and the beach roses thrown out brambles over the blistered wood. From the sturdier bushes, and some of the fenceposts still upright, small and intricate constructions dangle—dead sea detritus, fish skulls, sinew dried to parchment, that itch at your attention. Like burrs or broken shells, and more than once you have stopped yourself from reaching out to tear one down. You think it might have been a salmon head, wrapped in the green threads of maiden’s hair and staked in the sun to mummify; cormorant’s feathers for a collar, and half an inch away your fingertips burn. As much trap as shield, and not so sure of yourself that you care to spring it; you close your hand at your side and walk on, though the sand is filling your shoes.

  **

  When she has taken from him all he can tell of tides and leviathans, sirens and herring shoals, and the designs of phosphorescence in the deep, she kneels at the edge of the sea-wall and opens her hand. What sifts down over him might be salt, or sand, or the tropical-beach whiteness of crushed shell, but it flecks the water and eddies in spirals and sinking archipelagos, and it holds him back from the turning tide. “What else?” she says. “What’s coming?”

  “Shadow,” answers the drowned man. Out of the clearing sky, sunlight slopes as thickly translucent as amber: sparks on the sea, her own shadow lying ghostly over the olive-glass water. His blue mouth, his sludgy lungs; in his ragged eyesocket, water glints. Perhaps she smiles. “Shadow is coming.”

  She closes her fingers then, on wind and sunlight, and lets the sea have him back. There is so little difference between them, her and the sea, the sea and him.

  **

  She invited you in, or you might still be standing on her rotted steps. The house opens and closes around you like sleight-of-hand, too much or too little space for the angles of stairs, doorways, rain-ruined floors. In one corner, a torn mattress lies under a tumble of sheets, all littered with small rips and snags as though a flock of birds or scissors has been at them. Sunlight through the salt-flecked panes falls in merciless swathes over stained plaster and scarred wood, crunched splinters of shell and a porous whiteness that might be bone laid long in a tidepool, scattered seaweeds, the clouded blues and frost-greys and bottle-greens of beach glass flung as carelessly over the floor as dice. With carpenter’s nails, she has pinned a tern’s wing and a leather-dried drape of kelp to the wall that faces away from the sea. There is a low-tide smell everywhere, fish-market trash.

  She kneels in a cleared patch, on one knee, courting nothing. Older than you expected, from the grey lines in her hair; or younger, in short-sleeved camouflage and cargo pants, barefoot on her unswept floor. Beside her reddened hand, the mouth of a canvas tote bag has folded open, spilled out clams, mussels, wet stones and the snapped half of a sand dollar; a sea-harvest, littoral cornucopia. Her fingers wrapped loosely, comfortably, around the handle of a boning knife. Her wrists braceleted with seagrass. She knows your name.

  While she sorts among her catch, you explain: she dries the moon snail on a threadbare corner of her shirt as you tell her the names that should serve as a pass-key, the fragmented trail you followed to her door; she clicks two cherrystone clams together in her palm like ball bearings when you almost whisper your question. Her gaze is cool, tidal, sardonic if she only smiled. There is a pattern strewn around her, that you would rather not understand.

  “Yes.” Her knife slices through one of the clamshells, halves the ruffled, salt-dripping flesh that she scoops out with her fingers and lays at one triangulation of blackened weed. She sounds dry, absent, perhaps irritated with the banality of oracles; or her thoughts are with the sea. Then she prods the clam-meat, and for the first time her mouth slides upward in a faint smile. “Here, a token.”

  The pearl within the clam’s pouched greyness is the color between blood and black, misshapen as a tooth. You hear yourself stutter as you ask, “Is that an answer?”

  Meditatively, she turns the monstrosity between her fingers before she sets it down between the moon snail and the eviscerated clam, adjusts its position after a moment’s critical glance. There is a crust of salt in her hair, stiff as though with blood or lime. “It might be,” she says. “But I’m not the oracle.”

  **

  Because he loved her, because she loved the sea, he let her do the things she wanted: to him and the sea together. When she gutted fish and made maps of their cold, blood-slimed entrails, he obediently recorded her spoken notes and made his own sketches to compare with hers. Afterward, with kisses, he cleaned the scales from her fingertips; he would find streaks of fish blood drying in his hair in the morning. She divided the sky into quadrants, over sea and over land, and sat for hours with a camera and a compass, snapshots of birdflight—herons, sandpipers, gulls—taken home to peruse and pick secrets from the air. Sometimes he trapped those same birds for her, as he hauled up fish jerking on the end of a line and brought them, still flopping, jack-knife glitter of spray and dappled sides, to her doorstep of his own accord. “My half-drowned love,” she laughed, and the mackerel’s gills gaped scarlet and starved under her deft hands as he watched.

  She threaded gull bones into jewelry, combed her hair like a Cape Cod girl with the barbed rack of a fish’s spine. Half homemade arcana, half meticulous study, all craziness and no one else in this world would he find who loved knowledge half so much: no one else who would ever understand what drove him, even then. These are memories that not even the coldest currents will flood from his brain. He will forget his bones before he will forget her.

  He would watch her draw spirals and sigils of salt, poured through the fist like painter’s sand, white on cloudy white traced across the stained, worm-riddled wood that she kept on her floor. That long slat of planking, they had pried up from the docks one night with a crowbar and a torch that he almost fumbled into the water at the rending creak and groan of splinters, a salmon-leap of fear sideways through his chest that the whole structure would fall in on itself and they would drown under the weight of oyster-plated, weed-slippery wreckage— But she was the one whose foot skidded, and he caught her. Never a strong man, nor a tall one, but his hand locked around her wrist and the darkened waters never touched her: a cheat, as all his skills were, the universe momentarily conned. When she had her breath back, “I want to know how you did that,” she said, her hungering mantra, and he tried to teach her. But he knew too little of the sea, too much of books that had burned eight hundred years ago and all the ways to invite death. Her kisses always tasted of salt, drying scales, blood, distraction.

  He had expected she would tire of him. Out on the open water on a glassy midafternoon, sitting at the tiller of her bad-tempered, nameless motorboat, he watched her dip kelp over the side to keep it pliable and knot the slick, tensile streamers into a sort of net. “The eyes of the sea,” she told him, obliquely, all her attention on the seaweed in her hands. “A depth oracle. Sounder than salt, because it’s closer,” though she had carefully observed what patterns the salt spilled over the plank, that morning before they left. The old anchor they had manhandled into the boat was already wre
athed in more kelp, starfish as red as scalded flesh and purple-spined sea urchins tied into the drying mesh. She wore gold and brown bladderwrack in her hair like a coronet, brittling black in the sun.

  “I don’t think you can use an anchor for an eye of the sea,” he warned her, as always more curious about the procedure than the end result. If she failed, she would make love to him in angry, ambitious compensation, and try again, and he would watch: they would learn. “Or starfish. You really need something that’s not of the sea, preferably alive. I think Phaiakos recommended children, because amniotic salt is like the salt of the sea—so they would be very much at home in the depths, but of course very small children don’t speak, so there are certain problems with this theory. Corpses also are not much better. You want ideally something that can think.”

  She was bent over the side of the boat, hands working beneath the gold-reflected water that rocked up and slapped at the boat, the movements of her shoulders under her camouflage T-shirt sensuous in their carelessness. When she looked finally over her shoulder, he could have smoothed back her wind-snarled hair with his palms and kissed her, sea-tang and obsession and all. But her pale, sun-glint eyes were examining him, like a stray whorl of salt or the blood-puzzle of a tern’s insides: as closely as she never looked at any human thing, and he knew he should not have been surprised.

  “I love you,” she said. Her face had never been made for tenderness, but neither had he heard her speak so gently, except perhaps in her incantations to the sea. “You are the only person I have ever loved.” Then she heaved the kelp-net out of the sea, in a hail and dazzle of salt water that sluiced over him as coldly as the seaweed clung to his skin, as irretrievably, and he never had the chance to answer her. When he tried to speak, all his words flowed away into the immense, ancient, deep-churning heart of the sea. With something like pride, perverse to the last, he recognized the traces of a trick he had taught her: she had fooled not only physics, but him.

  When she fastened his wrists to the anchor, hemp rope stronger than seaweed, crucified on the cool, rust-powdered flukes of iron, he began to scream. She watched his scream rising in bubbles, soundless, long after the green silt shadows had covered him from sight.

  Every moment of his descent, even after his lungs had filled and his heart foundered on currents and depth, he saw her: all the sea was his sight now.

  **

  She will not let you follow her, this sibyl of the seven seas whose prophecies are from the earth-shaker, not the laurel and the sun, and so you roam her odd, abandoned house while she consults with the depths. In the kitchen, cabinet after rusty-hinged cabinet opens on a mess of shells, water-tumbled stones, feathers and seaweeds bound together with twist-ties in no arrangement that you recognize; three ceramic plates on the last shelf, a plastic cereal bowl, coffee cups from two different sets. The rooms upstairs are as weathered and vacant as the disastrous porch, open to sea winds and bleaching sunlight and each step groans under your feet like a ship about to go down in a storm. In the little bathroom, the uncurtained shower and the mineral-crusted drain, she has set starfish to dry against the window’s pebbled panes. The photographs over the mantel, where she burns driftwood to charcoal that stains under your nails, show the black-and-white faces of a family you suspect was never hers—mother, father, pale-haired son and daughters, on holiday in the mountains and their smiles are too innocent.

  Afternoon wanes, the sunlight thickens landward. Never mind what price you placed in her callused, knife-scarred hand, you loiter in the hall and do not look in on the pattern half-formed on her floor, hands as nonchalantly in your pockets as your pulse hurries in your throat, and you would leave if you had not wondered what might see you go. In one of the upstairs rooms, you found fish heads and shark jaws ranged across the silvered floorboards like sentinels, bear-traps of cartilage and slivered bone, meticulous teeth. Downstairs on the radiator, that disintegrated scaffold of stitches and hair and scales and wire was once, you think, a sailor’s mermaid. Even her books are salt-stained on their shelves, and you sit determinedly down on the lowest step of the stairs and almost yell when she says, unexpected and casually, “Still here, are you?”

  “Yes.” You do not say, where else would you go? The one word dries your mouth. Where the sun westers through the windows, the rooms are full of hot light and silhouettes; the shadows of the sea-things on the floor run together like ideograms. “What did—it—say?”

  “Shadow.” She comes around the corner, still picking a knot out of her heavy, wood-colored hair; she looks no more identifiable in age, no more concerned, but her mouth is drawn to a different line, and for a moment you do not want to know what oracles she dipped up from the ocean for you, you want to know what in the world could make her look like that. If you ever could, with what word or touch or secret, effect such a transformation. As impossible a dream as isles of glass or palaces under sea or abyssal temples, countries you will never reach; as she studies you, her face is already changing and she repeats, “Shadow’s coming. Shadow off the sea. That’s what he said.”

  “He?”

  “The oracle,” and there is some private amusement here that you cannot read. “He only knows what the sea knows. But the sea knows a lot.”

  She moves past you, then, before you can put out a hand to catch her or even press her for more information—this cold intimation that you bargained for and bought, like a storm-front that shivers over your skin—and the sugar bowl she takes down from the nearest sill is full of coarse sea salt instead. As she pours a measure into her palm, she looks up one last time at you. There are glaciers the color of her eyes, sheets of glass, light through waves. There are sun-warmed waters where the fish breed, and then there is the abyss. “You asked,” she tells you, perhaps as kindly as she can; perhaps not. Her fingers trace across the floor, find the blood-dark pearl in its stripe of sunset. “Don’t stay.”

  Down her steps, the air swims: hazed and honey-viscous, where the sun has burned behind the hills; the waves are blackened and gold. When you glance over your shoulder, her house looks only dilapidated, flotsam and jetsam, no more otherworldly than the dried sticks half-buried in the sand at your feet. No strange awareness prickles at you from the beach roses. The oracle pronounced; you were answered; you are, oddly, no longer afraid. Still, as you trudge up the dunes, toward beachfront parking and your car and all the reasoned world you ducked out of for a time, you do not like to set your back to the sea.

  **

  In the last of the sunset, she pushes small bones and still-wet seaweeds into configuration; she closes her hand on razor coral until the skin of her palm parts like gills. When she traces all the interconnections with salt, the pain burns bone-deep and she clenches her teeth on it, as critical as the geometries of oyster shell and petrel feathers, the fossil gastropod like a thumbnail twist of stone. Afterward, she binds her hand and builds up the fire, and watches the driftwood fall to embers in the salt-flickered blue, as the sea darkens for the night.

  **

  In the dreams of the drowned man, that are the dreams of the sleepless sea, she finds him in a gallery of kelp and a garden of bones, and she lays her hand on his forehead.

  Naked even of her sea-tattered clothes, her ribcage is a white basket of pearls and anemones, the soft pulse of flowered, fire-colored mouths against pirate’s-treasure masses of nacre shelled over pain, and her fingernails are each seed-beaded blue as scallops’ eyes.

  He blinks the crab from his eye, red algae from his lashes. Around them, bones tap and clack in the blackness from which all light has been crushed, that not even his own faint phosphorescence fades farther than her; kelp-stalks and bannered leaves, slippery on his skin that never feels the cold. She gleams and clicks as she leans over him, rust-bronze fragments of kelp caught in her vertebrae, at her ankles, the sea-combed stream of her hair. He cannot whisper her name; the sea dissolved his voice into its own. But she hears him. She can always hear the sea.

  When she par
ts her lips, small fish as silver as bubbles stream from her mouth to his; the moray eel that coils about her collarbones slips loose, slides around his thigh. Barnacles stud the fanned backs of her hands, clouded now with bioluminescence brushed off from his sea-colonized skin. But the restless water picks his flesh from him like another needless garment, discards face and hands like hat and gloves, all the softness that does not endure time, until he shines as pale and polished as she. In the hollow of his hip, an octopus like a clot of black velvet resettles its arms; in and out of his mouth, her fish respire.

  The eel circles, signs them together, handfast, and an anemone falls like a tossed flower slowly from her bones to his.

  **

  Sailing by these stars, you will never find your way home.

  Acknowledgments

  For the stories collected here, my thanks to Mike and Anita Allen, John Benson, Steve Berman, Victor Bers, Liz Bourke, C.S.E. Cooney, L. Timmel Duchamp, Scarlett Dvorkin, Amal El-Mohtar, Jeannelle M. Ferreira, Gemma Files, Michael Fiveash, Francesca Forrest, Eckart Frahm, Lila Garrott-Wejksnora and Ruth Wejksnora-Garrott, Jaym Gates, Greer Gilman, Jed Hartman, Ainsley and Andrew Hawthorn, Merav Hoffman, Lynne Jamneck, Mattie Joiner, Caitlín R. Kiernan and Kathryn Pollnac, Rose Lemberg, Hestia Hermia Linsky-Noyes, Elise Matthesen, Lenny Muellner, Rob Noyes, Tim Pratt and Heather Shaw, Sofia Samatar, Maury Stein, Shoshana Stern, Andrew Swensen, Lawrence Szenes-Strauss, Tybalt Autolycus Taaffe, Bogi Takács, Sheryl Tempchin, E. Catherine Tobler, Allan and Barbara Tosti, Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, Torger Vedeler, Sean Wallace, Kathryn Wilham, Luis Yglesias, and Michael Zoosman.