Jess whined her good night, then curled up in the space under the bed, the place she often slept for whole days now.
“That dog’ll die there,” Pa had said yesterday. “One day that’ll be it. Sometimes I think the only thing keeping her alive is those flowers.”
Moss shivered to think it, glancing under. Jess’s eyes glinted. Not dead yet.
Moss pulled back the blanket. She’d get in just for a little warmth, just ’til Pa was deep-sleeping. She blew out the candle. Pa rolled over in sleep, his fingers grazing her back. As a Small Thing, long before Callan washed in, Moss had lain curled and cocooned with Pa; now the space between them felt too little, Pa’s breath too close, and his snoring kept her awake. She thought of Cal in his hut, all the space and silence he had. She could sleep there. She could go from these covers and curl up next to him instead. If Cal would still welcome her.
She turned onto her back, let Pa’s hand drop. She reached under his pillow to check, and—yes—there were stormflowers, a dried-up wad of them, bound together with stem sap. These days, with his Blackness always so close, Pa was never far without them. She broke off a small corner and put a petal against her tongue. It fizzed there. She waited, letting it tingle.
Tell them what you wish for. They make things happen. Make things change.
She’d seen it. Many storm seasons ago.
Moss felt the burst of sweetness, the thrill of the flower-rush inside, the grin in her cheeks. The buzz in her chest was firefly-fast.
Tonight she wished for land. To see it. To know it was there.
As she did, the buzzing feeling changed, moved deeper inside her. Now the petals weren’t making her relaxed, or happy, but queasy-strange. She took another dried petal and, after a short-quick buzz, the same thing happened. When it happened a third time, she put the wad of dried petals back under the pillow. Perhaps Pa had left them there so long they had gone full-flat. Then she had a further thought: Maybe Pa had gone to Blackness so fast tonight because the flowers weren’t so potent as normal.
Or maybe he was simply getting sicker—so sick now that not even the flowers couldn’t work against it. She rested her eyes, just for a moment. Just … for.
One.
Dream.
And … as her breathing deepened …
She felt fingers in hers, a hand. A pulling forward.
In this fever dream, she went to the sea.
There were lights on its surface. Fizzing. Shooting across the salt water like stars. Gold flowers on Moss’s skin, in her hair. The sea was writhing and swaying, wanting Moss inside. Beyond the reef, frothing wave tips grew.
Moss stepped into the water, and the sea made room. There was that feeling in her hand again, pulling her. Beyond the reef. Beyond.
Moss dived, and a shadow beside her dived too. She went down and the water bent from her movement. She and the shadow were made from the ocean now—they swam because it let them. Down there, Moss did not need air. She opened her skin and breathed sea instead. She felt it wash inside her, felt its salt rasp her ribs. Down there, the sun mixed with the blue and turned everything green. She could stay. She could dream.
But there was a noise. An angry voice. A watery dark figure down there with her. He was back. She curled away quick-fast … looked for the lights.
Now she was swimming fast, aiming for the surface. She swam. Stretching her body out, her dark hair smoothed straight. Her skin hardened and her legs lengthened. Something like scales came. Around her now were flowers, swimming with her: a whole tide. Moss moved with them, toward the lights and away from the angry man. Toward the surface. Until, when she rose up and gasped air, she knew there was land—real-proper land that she could see there solid. Direct ahead.
But when she turned to look back at the shore of her island and blinked in the sunlight—
Her island was gone.
She was bobbing alone in the waves.
Awake.
* * *
She blinked in the dark and spread her fingers wide. She could feel the blanket, the holes in it. She heard Pa’s snore. There was rain, mouse-footstep light on their roof, and there was wind at their door, curling underneath. She felt it creeping toward her neck and chin, waking her skin. But there were no gull cries this time, no Cal. Only an uncomfortable fluttering of breath in her chest, like trapped wings.
Pa had hit Cal.
Cal had seen land.
Cal had not given Birthday Surprise.
None of this had happened before.
She sat up, moved away from Pa, and left the hut. The rain gentle-pricked her as she pulled her coverings close. She squinted at the sea for that land again, but it was too dark, with the moon no longer so high. But something felt different out there. She had seen land in her dreaming now, too.
Moss checked the tree line for lizards or wild dogs, wishing Adder had come with her. She puffed when she got to the steep bit, her breath hanging before her, half real. Cal’s hut was a dark, brooding lump, crooked against the sky, built against the cliffs. Slow-careful, she pressed open its door. Inside was sea-smell and darkness.
“Cal?”
She waited for her eyes to adjust before she moved farther in.
“Pa did not mean it,” she whispered. “Maybe the flowers not been working so well … I found dried-out ones under his pillow, working strange …”
No answer.
She recognized the bundle of softness on the floor that was Cal’s bed. She crawled up close, stretching across until her hand found the edge of his blanket. She worked her fingers along. Any moment, she would touch his cool skin. Cal could grab her, even take her away like Pa had said.
In a boat, in a storm … take you from me.
He could kiss her again, too. Let her sleep beside. Yin-yanged. He could talk of how they might reach the land he’d seen. She could clasp his hand tight as they ran, looking.
“I believe you,” she whispered. “About the land. You have to be right.”
Her fingers touched where his head should be, felt down the blanket for the rest of him. But met nothing. No Cal. His hut was now as empty as her birthday oyster shells.
Cal stood on slippery rocks, watching the going-back tide. Even with roaring waters, he heard them—throwing words like throwing rocks. Fierce-fast.
“You hurt him, Pa!”
“But he lies, don’t you see? He is not who he was.”
“You are not who you were!”
Her voice was bird-flapping, all flighty-feared. Pa’s voice unsteady.
But if they had trusted Cal …
Had listened …
Cal sniffed at sweetness. There were petals. He saw their color, now and now again, trying to circle. He shut his mouth ’case they wanted to come in. Did no good to be trusting them flowers too much. Weather was brewing strange—up and down—them flowers maybe helping.
“Cal could be right …” That’s what Moss was saying now. “Why won’t you consider it another way?”
“There is no other way!” The Pa again. “We wait until we know the floods are gone. Only then do we leave!”
But Cal knew things like other ways. He knew a whole egg clutch of other ways that Pa did not care to. He knew there was a secret in the Lizard Rocks, hiding deep. He should’ve told Moss when he’d had her close.
But he would not go near Moss while the Pa was beside her. Not now.
He dug his toes into the rock pool, searching for sea worms or limpets or other juicy snacklings—still listening. He had been watching Moss close these past two days, and still she had not found him.
And the birthday surprise were waiting.
“Birthday Surprise.”
Cal whispered the words on the air. Maybe Moss would catch them. Cal saw flowers open their petals and turn their heads to him.
“Come find.”
“Soon.”
He sent more whispers out. But still, Moss stayed with the Pa.
Darkness now. Might as well feed these snackl
ings to the lizards! Might as well jump to the tides and let the rest of ’em go pissin’! But he would get pulled back, oh yes … There’d be the jerk on his spine, the catching. There’d be the fear of going under.
He hissed loud, then went still-silent listening—they still bickered like seabirds in spring. He pressed his toenail to sticky sand; sea worms should be uncovering themselves. He dug, dug, dug, ’til he felt sea worms poke-tickling his foot. Though he could not find the strength to pluck one. Even when it would slip down his throat so long and soft and tasty.
Instead, he pushed his head to the wind and went loping ’cross sand. With her or no, he would see Birthday Surprise proper, go right through them tunnels ’til he knew for certain-true it were what he thought.
There was strong salt smell on this new wind, and that gave him memory of Moss from moons ago with salt-wetness on her face. As he ran, Cal pulled at the memory. When Moss had bad dreamings, there was often salt-wetness on her face. After one bad dreaming, Cal had pressed his tongue to her cheek and tasted her salt-tears. Licked them right inside him. And she had laughed then. And her tears had stopped.
Cal often thought about Moss’s salt-tears—still inside him, still biting and molding. Like how the waves cut back rocks and made caves. P’raps he was hollow from her.
Cal sucked air through teeth, kept loping. It would take so long to get to the Lizard Rocks as for stars to come. But Cal was fast in rhythm, and his legs were longer now. He would see proper this time—go down-deep crawling in the dark to know what was true-there.
“Been ignoring us?” Moss said. “Not seen you for three days.”
Cal tilted his head. “You ignore me.”
Moss watched him from across the fire, cleaning fish. They were tucked in close, sheltering under the woven palm covering and avoiding light rain. He stopped to sweep scraggle-wild hair from his face with the back of his hand.
“Still stewing-angry with Pa?”
He shrugged.
“You know he did not mean it, Cal.”
His shoulders pointed toward each other and his eyes watched the ground. Sideways, they watched her, too. There was something different about him, and it wasn’t just the eye. He was curled over as if he’d been collecting heavy fish from a net, but maybe it were secrets he was collecting instead.
Moss dug her toes into the dirt, drew spirals. “I keep going to your hut. You’re never there.”
“Found new place.”
“Where?”
“Where these fishies come from.”
Moss squinted at the sandfish. It was late in their season. She did not know how Cal would have caught them in a net cast from rocks.
“Did you swim for those? Spearfish?”
She could not imagine it, not with how he trembled in deep water.
“I called and they came right in.” Cal rasp-laughed, not the same easy laugh she’d heard the other night on the rock in the sea. She risked a smile at him.
“I missed you,” she said, so quiet she did not know if Cal heard.
She drew spirals going out and then spirals going in, like the spirals Pa had drawn on the walls of his cave.
The shape of life. That’s what he called them. Shape of change. Never-ending, constant-moving.
Spiral.
Spiral.
Spiral.
Nothing stays still … always spirals …
Drawing them always made Moss still, though. She drew patterns in the gaps between the curving lines. Cal watched her draw, though she knew he pretended otherwise by digging harder in the fish guts.
“You make stories,” Cal had said once. “With only sticks in sand.”
“… just scratched lines.”
“But is real, too. You make it mean something.”
The compliment had made her smile. He wouldn’t make it now.
“Three days,” she said again.
Three days I’ve been thinking about the sand on your lips.
Wondering if you hurt.
If you hate.
“Not my fault.” Another shrug. Cal was full of the shrugs today.
The colors around his eyes were spiraling from red to purple to blue to, almost, yellow. Moss had left aloe leaves for him on the stoop of his hut—ones she’d gone for ’specially—but he’d not used them. Did he blame her for the eye? Did he wish she’d followed him into the dark instead of staying with Pa?
“Pa’s still sick,” she said. “Sicker than I ever seen him. One moment he’s shouting-angry, the next he’s murmuring about how bad he feels about what he did.”
“He cannot help himself.”
“He was in fever, Cal.”
“He hurt.”
The weight of his words dropped heavy, made silence. Moss kept drawing spirals, kept looking up to watch Cal’s long-thin fingers working on the fish: small and scrawny today, their bones delicate and easy to cut through. She didn’t know why Cal had bothered with them, not when he could have found fat-bellied fish in their own cove pools. Tonight they’d be eating grit and skin, chewing on bone. Perhaps this was Cal’s plan: to get one of those needle bones to stick in Pa’s throat. She shivered sudden as she remembered that fierce look in Cal’s eyes as he’d glared at Pa. Could Cal ever hurt Pa proper? Would he? These days she weren’t sure of anything.
“Haven’t seen your land again,” she told Cal. “I’ve been looking.” She knew Pa hadn’t seen it, either.
“Just ’cause you do not see,” Cal said, “do not mean land not there.”
“Right. Just ’cause there’s no tasty sea snail before me too …”
Cal dug deep-quick into the fish, plopped guts and clots of blood to the dirt. He was doing it on purpose, teasing her with showing this fishy’s most disgusting parts. Normal days, she wouldn’t care—she’d show him something disgusting back—but today …
The pain in her stomach came again.
“Why you not believe?” he said, quiet. “About the land. You saw it too. Why you go with Pa so easy?”
Cal’s eyes flashed, surprising her even now. Firesparks, she’d called them once. She looked at his arms instead of getting lost there: his muscles now like taut sea kelp, stringy and tough.
“I been waiting for you,” he said. “I got things to show. Birthday Surprise. Remember?”
Was this the pearl inside the shell—why he was so dark-angry with her as well as Pa—because she hadn’t come to see her birthday surprise?
A corner of his lip curled. “And if you tell me to hurry up with your fishy dinner, you can piss off.”
She grinned. “You can piss off yourself. And take as long as you like with those sandfish; they won’t take long to eat.”
“Pissh, pissh, pisshh.” Cal made a rhythm with the words that went in time with the slip-slip of his blade.
“Sometimes I wish I’d never taught you our language.”
“Sometimes I wish it too.”
She kept her grin. She and Cal were still shy-fragile as skate eggs, but he was smiling back now, at least. He finished with the fish he’d been working on and sharpened his knife for the next.
“Why don’t you, anyway?” she said. “Why don’t you try to get to that land you see?”
Cal held up a bloodied fish, thrust it toward her. “Who’d clean your fish?”
Fish flesh fell on her leg, a little watered-down blood trickled over her calf. She smudged it away.
“You could make a raft again.”
“Need you to come with.”
Moss looked at the rain falling soft in the dirt beyond their shelter. “And if I did come with and we went beyond the reef again? We keep sailing ’til a shark takes us? Or ’til we forget?”
He shook his head. “There’s land.” But there was doubt there, sure, in the creases of his forehead.
He lies, echoed the words in her head. Pa’s words.
Again, she felt that dull rumble of an ache in her belly. Far off, the sky rumbled too.
“If there is land, we
should wait until we see it proper,” she said, Pa’s words again. She sighed. “And you know I can’t leave Pa long while he’s in fever.”
Cal went back to the fish, and Moss picked up a pair of smalls she’d been making on and off. She bent her head, pushing the rusted needle through feather-thin cloth; it wouldn’t be long before what little cloth they’d left would be full gone. She pushed the needle firmer when the cramping pains came again. Then pressed her fingers below her belly button, where the pain was worst, and tried to think of a calm sea; a tide rising like a soft breath. When Adder came, she settled next to Moss and rested her head on the paining place too. Moss tickled her ears.
“It’s not sickness,” she said. “Not like Pa got.”
Cal shrugged. “Full moon this night. Elvers about.”
Quick-fast, Moss was thinking about those baby eels, slipping down her throat. Elvers would help sickness. Cal was on one of the larger sandfish now, his hands working quicker. She remembered those hands clasped tight around her on that rock in the ocean, when they’d curled her close. Again, she missed the curve of him.
She pricked her thumb sharpish, sucked at the blood. The sky, too, was bleeding color. And stormflowers were opening; she could smell them. Another storm? She watched Cal shiver through his coverings. They always used to sit close before a storm, drawing heat from each other: birds on a branch.
Moss finished sewing the smalls, then tucked them into the waist of her skirt. They were sad toil today, and she would have to do more of it tomorrow. Pa had smalls to be made too, and judging by how Cal was shivering, perhaps she would make him something extra. When she saw Adder’s legs twitching as they ran across dream-sand, Moss knew she had running to do too.
She stood. They needed seagrass for supper, and she had not searched the tide today besides. Now that they could no longer count on Pa’s help, there were always more chores. She reached over Cal to fetch a pot, and he slunk from her.
“You’re like an elver today,” she said. “All slippery-spiraled.”
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