by Judith Field
Next there were sandwiches. Monte Cristo sandwiches. The essence of revenge on French toast, meted out for the honor of past dishes—dishes dreary, dull and drab. Succulent turkey; rich, thick, acorn-fed ham; headily aromatic cave-aged Gruyere cheese; all between two thick slices of sweet cinnamon crispy-on-the-outside, soft-on-the-inside French toast, and topped with a delicate sweet snow-fall of powdered sugar.
Dessert was again peach melba. The peaches were at their seasonal height: at once firm and plump and moist, sweet and tangy and sunny. Topped with ice cream, lightly vanilla’d, and raspberry sauce, sweet, sour, sensuous and sinful, it was fruity, creamy splendor.
And after dessert, the wine. A 70-year Sauternes, sweet and zesty while at the same time deep and complex, with nuttiness that resonated across the palate. Wine to die for. Wine to live for. It was the perfect finish to the perfect summer meal, a meal nobody else on Earth could have had in December.
There were other tears in the cosmos, all with varying consequences and all, thought Katy, justifiable in the name of science. Also, a meal such as that would always carry a heavy price tag.
Katy awoke the next morning to find his laboratory barn ransacked. All of his delicate electronics were smashed. His papers, once meticulously ordered, now littered the floor. Everything had been touched, handled, manipulated, and quite a few things had been taken, including the device.
The thief even had the audacity to stop and have a snack before leaving with Katy’s life’s work.
He later deduced that the thief had probably been after an archaeological artifact his father had left him, the Zakariya Idol. Some legend or other spoke of untold power to the wielder of the idol, but Katy cared little. He had kept the idol in a closet, and had kept his work focused on real science.
Katy cursed his father for leaving that sort of mumbo jumbo around and attracting thieves.
Now he would have to do something about it.
GHARBI ISLAND, TUNISIA. JUNE 19TH, 1899
Now the sun was being downright rude, thought John Katy. One hundred and eighteen degrees was just plain ridiculous. He sat on the beach, praying that the strong sea wind he had heard about would pick up sometime soon and alleviate the heat. He drained a bottle of Madeira and let out a dry laugh that turned into a cough.
Katy expected the thief to show up any moment. She had been there a month previously, only to find the object of her search missing. The Great Stone of Utman had come to rest here, on this deserted beach, hidden in plain sight. At least, it had rested there until Katy removed it six weeks ago. Now the thief would have no choice but to return to wherever she was based and retrieve the device. Only then could she return a portion of the beach to the time when the Stone was there, and take it. And he would be ready for her. He had spent three and a half years, his every last penny, and much of his health on this search.
An hour earlier one of the local kids he paid to keep watch had notified him of a boat coming in carrying a white lady. Sure enough, here she came now, toting a small trunk. She flashed Katy a coy smile as she approached.
“I should have known you would be here,” she said. “Given what I’ve seen of your little machine, it was only a matter of time before you went from one step behind to two steps ahead.”
“Where’s the device?” said Katy.
“No introduction? No time for small talk? No—” Katy balled his fist and punched her. She tumbled down into the sand. He loomed over her.
“You broke into my house. You ransacked my lab. You stole my device. I have rent the universe. I have crippled space and time—what do you think I’ll do to you? Where is the device?”
The thief wiped blood from her chin. She glared at him. “I’ll trade you for the Stone.”
“Fine.”
She sat up and unbuckled the trunk. Inside was the device. “It doesn’t matter anyway. I don’t care about your experiment. I have the Hafsid Scepter. I have the Zakariya Idol. Once I have the Great Stone of Utman, I will be unstoppable.”
Katy wasn’t listening, and instead fiddled with the device. “By the way,” he said, “after you ransacked my lab, did you enjoy your snack? Blueberries, right? Fresh blueberries, in December. They would have been glorious. I broke the world to get those blueberries, and you ate them. And no one—no one—takes that away from me.”
The device flashed, and the thief was gone.
A ghost is said to haunt the beach on Gharbi Island. On lonely nights she appears briefly, enraged, crying, tearing at her clothes and skin, and is gone again just as quickly. Legend, oddly specific in this case, claims that she will do so for another four hundred and sixty-one years.
Christopher Lee Kneram is a freelance writer who is much like you, but from Ohio. When no one is looking he pens absurd fiction, much of which can be found around the internet.
DRIED SKINS UNSHED
By Julie Day
WE FISHER-FOLK had lived along Ocean Bay for as long as any of us could remember, Hamills with boats and nets heading out before dawn. Beyond that…
The fairy tales of torn flesh and scaled creatures from the deep? Well, I can’t speak for the others, but I was never entirely convinced. Still and all, I was the one who stayed. Angie Hamill: the only Hamill left in Ocean City, the only Hamill who still carried the old stories. Let my brothers leave, my daughter too. I wasn’t moving.
We have always been a family of storytellers. Driftwood fires on the beach. The older folks resting on their rickety aluminum chairs. Us kids kicking back and forth around the fire, settling for a few minutes and then darting off again, restless as sand fleas.
“Angie girl,” Granny Marie would call out as I slipped close to the water’s edge yet again, “get your green eyes back away from there. It’s too dark.”
Later, we’d leave the empty beer bottles behind, green glass in the sand. Perhaps an offering to our past? Perhaps a token of good luck? Though our eyes somehow never struck us as lucky; green too, but with a tinge of yellow. All our eyes alike.
Close those eyes now and the fire’s heat is with me still, the stories, too. Granny Marie and her brother Tony sipping from their paper bags as they took turns telling us “How the First Hamill Reached Ocean City” and “Davie Hamill’s Choice” and sometimes, if the night sky was dark enough, “Who We Were Before.”
I’d spent the last twenty years cleaning my way through the condos and summer homes of Ocean City, sponging my way through discolored tiles and toilet bowls filled with ink-blue water, waiting for something that never appeared. Still, I’d stayed close to the sea—my sea.
But in the end, none of that mattered.
The first time I saw them, it was a complete accident. I always walked the beach before bed, had for years. But usually I wandered farther north, past the pier, close to where our house once stood, collecting slivers of sea glass, green and worn smooth, that I’d toss back into the water. Though lately, on my nighttime walks, I’d find scraps like skin, translucent scales, hidden among the dune grasses.
This particular night I was working late. Heading home after my last job, I could feel my chapped lips cracking in the cold November air. I could still smell the undiluted Pine Sol Mrs. Gimet demanded I use in her tiny bathroom.
“Such a fresh smell,” she had explained one too many times.
My apartment was on a side street just off of Point Hill Road. I dropped the battered, grey Bissell by the front door and reached for my fleece-lined windbreaker. Why not head to the pier instead of the dunes—just this once?
I strode down the short hill that led to the water, the ocean no more than a half-mile away. A few of the houses had lights on, but otherwise the street was its usual quiet self. This time of year the town was almost empty.
I could see the lights long before I reached the wooden pilings. They peeked out from underneath the pier, small pinpricks, green-yellow like fireflies. The night was dark, the stars and moon hidden behind the ever-present clouds.
What could they be?
A bonfire? Perhaps… Someone tossing sulfur on the flames like we used to do as kids? Though, really, no one lit fires anymore. There was just too much rain. Or perhaps, I thought, squinting into the dark, it was a glow stick…a whole collection of glow sticks. I kept moving, my chin tucked into the collar of my coat, letting my hair fall forward across my eyes. There was not one other person on that stretch of beach, just the sound of the hard-packed sand beneath my shoes, the wind, and the sea itself.
Why did I even care? That’s the real question. Why did I care what lights shone from sea’s edge?
Something about them…
And then it came to me. High tide. How could I have forgotten? By now the ocean would have risen half-way up the pier’s wooden pillars. The lights weren’t on the beach at all, not now, not at seven p.m. The driftwood, the sand, the rotting seaweed, all of it submerged by the sea—the lights, too. Something, some things, were moving through the water close to shore.
“Oh!” I said.
And then I was sprinting toward the pier. But by the time I’d run that quarter-mile the lights were gone. Did they drift out to sea? Or were they somewhere closer by? I scanned the dark water but found nothing.
That night I didn’t sleep much as I tossed and turned in my bed. Staying. I’d been doing that for years. Waiting, now that was far harder.
¤
After all these years, I can still remember the words, still remember how Granny Marie’s body leaned in toward the fire, the shadows dark under her eyes.
Snakes ain’t supposed to be fearful creatures. We all know that. How many of us have come across one on some hot summer day, sun beatin’ down? They ain’t worried about us now are they? It’s us that’s worried. They always get to keep their rock or patch of dirt. Even when we got someplace to go. Even when we’re in a hurry. After all the sun may be warm, but they’re bound to get hungry at some point. Hungry or riled.
A snake, well, a snake knows something ‘bout time, too. When they shed their skin it ain’t quick but it is always and forever. The creature itself just continues on its way, all flickering tongue and yellow eyes and slithering green scales. It don’t ever look back—now that would be just plain foolish. The skins are what’s left over, nothing more. And then comes their hunger. All that skin shedding is bound to tire. But—
[And here she’d pause for a moment, and it seemed at those moments as if the glow in her eyes was more than just reflected firelight.]
Really, they ain’t no hungrier than you or me.
See. We’re snakes, too, snakes from the sea. Or that’s what we was from way, way back. And us sea creatures ain’t that much different from land snakes. All skins, and sun and hunger.
Now long ago, our family lived in a corner of the sea, not that cold, not that cloudy neither. The sun shone on the water plenty more than most places, but that didn’t mean nothin’. Each year there was still less and all those mouths still wanted feedin’. Not enough fish you see….
I loved Granny Marie on those nights by the fire. There were so many of us then. But people change. And then, eventually, they’re gone.
All those stories and yet I never once saw even one of us Hamills transform. Sure, my skin had gotten tighter over the years, leathery even, but that was just aging; my snake tattoos at this point were little more than faded stories. They wrapped around my shoulders and down across my chest all linoleum green and ballpoint blue. And, yes, it seemed my muscles, too, had hardened: my neck ropey, the backs of my arms and calves bisected by long corded tendons, my skin no longer able to hide the connections that held my body together.
My hair, though, was still the same jet black.
¤
I rented a boat for the very next night. I didn’t even wait to see if those lights returned. The boat should have been a working boat, with a deep keel and worn decks. But what I actually got was a motorboat, faded blue and fiberglass. Of course…
At the A&P the cashier didn’t even seem to notice the green cases of Rolling Rock piled high in my cart. How many years had I been buying the same six-pack from her?
“Ninety-two ninety-eight,” she intoned her eyes already on the next customer. I pushed the cart through the automatic sliding doors and out into the night. In fact, I pushed that cart all the way home.
My apartment sat above my landlord’s garage. I parked the shopping cart by the side door and dug up Granny Marie’s old metal cooler and the lantern she’d used all those years ago. At least that would be right.
I hauled it all to the dock down on Old Fort Street: the cooler, the lantern, all the glass bottles, even a yellow slicker I’d found tucked inside my closet.
All this and I’d only seen the lights once. How the hell did I know they would really come back?
Didn’t matter. I muscled the contents of the cart onto the boat, untied the rope from its cleat, pushed off with the metal boat hook, tossed it on the deck near the stern, and started up the motor. The tide was pressing in toward the shore, the boat fighting me as I steered it out onto the water. Either way, I made it out to the center of the bay, my boat between the pier and the wide expanse of ocean. I tied the boat to an old buoy, its red stripes faded almost to pink. It was just the buoy and me. Other than that, the water seemed empty.
Even with the yellow slicker and a fleece jacket underneath, it was cold. Nothing felt right. I hadn’t even brought a bottle opener…
And then I saw the lights, green-yellow against the black sky out toward the northern edge of the bay, moving closer, but in the direction of the pier. My hands clutched the wheel. Their path wouldn’t bring them anywhere near…
I felt a tightness in my chest and forced myself to exhale. I’d been holding my breath.
And then, suddenly, the lights veered left. Their destination now the buoy and the boat and, of course, me.
It didn’t take them long to reach me. At first all I could see were the eyes, a streaming column of green-yellow lamps, and then their bodies came into view. They were bigger than I’d expected, too big, arms and legs thick with muscle. And their scales shimmered in the light thrown by Granny’s lantern. They had fins, too, along their backs, a darker shade of green than the scales. Their eyes, as they finally got near, their eyes were not like mine at all, greenish-yellow to be sure, but closer to cat’s eyes, the pupils like closed doorways to some dark hell.
Why had they waited so long to return? Granny was dead. The cousins, too. Everyone else gone inland. Didn’t matter where. I was the only Hamill left, the only Hamill here to greet them.
Granny had never explained what I should do if they ever returned. The green glass by the fire, the bottles tossed from the old fishing boats, nothing but tokens, a promise that we Hamills hadn’t changed—the broken glass like eyes returning to the sea. Still the Rolling Rock was all I had, cases of it. In two steps I was in the center of the boat, Granny’s cooler stashed on one of the wide benches. I reached down into the old metal box and broke the first bottle, slamming its body against the side. Beer sprayed everywhere, glass and foam raining down into the water. A shard of glass nicked my cheek. I could feel the sting of torn flesh as a small tear of blood rose up on my skin. I reached for the next bottle with my right hand while my left hand still gripped the jagged neck of the first.
The creatures were more than eyes now, more than swimming bodies. I could feel the boat rocking as they pressed against it, could hear the port side slamming into the buoy.
And I was none too steady on my feet. My body swayed back and forth as I tried to hold myself upright. My knees bent into the waves. What the hell was I going to do next? And then, suddenly, I was going down. My right hand reached forward to grasp the side of the boat. My left hand swung wildly as I tried to catch myself. Before I could stop it, the bottle’s broken neck slashed into my forearm.
Nausea. Blood and the stink of beer everywhere. And now a mewing sound was coming from just beyond the boat. My ocean cousins, it seemed, liked my blood.
My fac
e, I’m sure, didn’t look pretty; my lips felt twisted and tight. I could hear the laughter rising up from my belly, the sound forcing its way out of my throat. And then something else happened, something that stopped me cold. The boat shifted back toward the stern as someone started climbing up. I turned. She was looking right at me. Her head rose just above edge of the fiberglass hull as her scaled hands gripped the boat on either side. The shape of her nose, her high forehead, they were both so familiar. Her face really wasn’t that different from my own. She hissed and then pushed up hard onto both forearms. Scaled arms, sure, but she had fingers and thumbs, just like me. And teeth. She had lots of those, too.
In less than a second I’d moved from the bow all the way to the back of the boat. I needed to get her off! I needed to get her off right now! All the glass bottles in the world wouldn’t change that fact. Cousin or not, this was not someone who wished me well.
I leaned over her rising body, pressing my hands against her shoulders and scaly chest. Her head jerked in the direction of my torn cheek. I could smell her breath, the smell like bitter, salty brine. And still I couldn’t move her. Those muscles. She was just so strong…
It wasn’t planned, but I started to yell, loud bellows, my face flushed and hot. But my ears were filled with the sounds of the ocean, the mewing of the others still in the water, and the creature’s own noise, an angry, impatient hiss.
The boat lurched and my hands slipped for a moment as our bodies shifted. Her opening. In an instant, she had thrust herself up and forward almost half-way onto the boat. Her hands now gripped my arms, her face far too close to mine. I screamed as I felt those teeth pressing down into the flesh of my cheek, screamed as I felt my skin burning. My arms flailed, one hand somehow finding the boat hook that now rested in the back corner. I swung it up with both fists, somehow knocking her back. Her hands, at least, were no longer holding me. I staggered back. I could feel the blood pouring, not dripping, from my face. The snake woman had fallen back, too, but not enough. She was hanging on with one arm already trying to right herself.