Land and Sea

kitty hardy

Land and Sea

My whole short life unfolded in a clapboard shack in the trees. It ended in the sea.

From our porch of raw wood, a winding dirt trail led down to where the ocean froths against the sand. You could dip your toes in the cold Atlantic, cold even in August. If you stood in it too long your joints would turn stiff and begin to ache and you'd understand how a swimmer could seize up and sink to the bottom like a stone.

From the beach there was a scramble up a stone wall that shapeshifted after every storm. Father called it his widow's walk. He'd walk up there often to the prow of the cliff, where he'd stand straight as a flagpole, his red flannel shirt pulsing in the wind.

He looked out of place by the sea, awkward and unyielding. He doesn't belong among the bent and gnarled trees that worm their roots down into stone. He is of the woods. He belongs among trees that stand as tall and straight as he and

pulse in the wind.My mom was of the sea, or so he told me.I haven't decided whether I am of the woods, or the sea.

The year I turned thirteen a hurricane flattened most of the villages along the coastline. Father, being one of the only woodsmen in the area, rented a room in town so he could work from sunup to sundown.

Left alone, I went to the ocean to hear voices other than my own. I climbed the widow's walk to watch the colourful fishing boats bobbing on the waves. They belong to the men in town. I wonder what it would be like to be a fisherman's daughter, to cast off with the first mists of morning. Untangling nets and swinging from the ropes, singing to pass the time.

I still imagine I can hear their songs.

And then I can hear a song, but it's nothing like the slurred and merry songs of the townspeople that drift through my window on foggy nights. It's a song that mocks as it beckons, sung by alien voices distant and indistinct. And yet, to my ear, they're as familiar as the path going down, through the trees, to the water.

With my father gone I am haunted by a dream. It's always the same: I am standing on the cliff, my white nightdress billowing like surrender. A wave towers up above me, glistening like steel, up, up it rises and then it washes over me, pulling me

out to sea until the land becomes a tiny spatter of grey and green paint on the horizon.

I float atop the water for a moment, my hair swirling around my face in tendrils of smoke, my dress a cloud beneath me, holding me up. Then the air is sucked out of it, out of my lungs by a mouth that descends from above. It's a mouth I've seen before, a mouth that I can remember singing to me, songs lilting and sweet, and more than a little sad.

The mouth drinks me up and I sink down, down into the inky depths. And as I sink my hair grows paler until it's as white as my dress and my face grows long and lined. I sway there, rolling in the deep, mouthfuls of salty water churning in my stomach, my breath encapsulated in bubbles. Just as I'm about to burst, to open my mouth and breathe water, my ribs open up in slats like gills, filtering oxygen from the water and into my veins.

When I wake up there's an old woman standing at the woodstove. I'm afraid of her. She has skin that flakes and quivers as though it would slide right off her bones if she dove into the ocean. Everything about her is ashen and faded, except her eyes, as bright and dark and alert as a young seal's. Wordlessly, she begins pinching herbs from bundles in the rafters and dashing them into a steaming pot. She hums as she works and I recognize the tune; it's the song of the sea.

I let out a gasp that makes her look at me out of the side of her eyes. A glint like the moon on the ocean shines deep in her irises.

“How do you know that song?”

Her mouth spreads in a mysterious smile, stretching the skin tight against her cheekbones and offering me a glimpse of a once radiant woman.

“I've always known it.”

She turns her back to me, ladles the liquid into a wooden bowl shaped by my father's hands, and passes it to me. Steam rises from the brew, obscuring my vision. It smells like rocks after rain, fresh turned earth, the final exhale of a fallen tree, the crisp of fresh fiddleheads in spring. I take a tentative sip. My hand takes on a life of its own, pouring the scalding liquid down my throat and into my belly where it churns like swallowed salt water. I try to hide my pain. I feel uneasy with her watching me with her moon-glint eyes. “You look just like your mother.” She whispers, her voice like the sigh of unseen waves at night.

“You knew my mother?” My voice a pleading whine barely squeezing through my singed throat, rising like the steam I hide behind.

“I've always known her.” She gazes out the window behind my head. Her eyes go soft, focussed on a spot of sunlight grazing the tops of the waves.

“I never knew her. She died giving birth to me.”

“Is that what he told you? Hmmm.” She hums, levelling her eyes to my face again. A small curious smile pulls at her lips. Her eyes snap closed.

“You are ready for the change.” She tucks a rubbery object in

my hand and gives me a shove out the door toward where the ocean froths against the sand. My legs are no longer my own. I feel the rise and fall of my steps beneath me as though I am cresting waves in a small boat.

Before I have a chance to wonder at what has possessed me I stand toe to toe with the ocean. My legs become my own again but my hands move by themselves, raising the rubbery skin to my face. It fuses over my mouth and nose, seeping cold dampness into my bones. I'm suffocating. I remember my nightdress, like a white flag of surrender. I allow my knees to buckle and I sink beneath the waves. An undertow coccoons my body and rocks me to sleep. I become too drowsy to keep my eyes open and yet as I sleep I'm aware of plummeting at incredible speeds.

I dream of a crimson ribbon, dancing listlessly from the branch of a tree, just out of reach.

——

When she wakes a large walrus looms above her. She rolls over to scramble out of its way before it crushes her, but it does not move. It is a walrus made of stone, a sentinel. Behind him rises a great glittering city made of glass. And drifting about it are creatures a child might imagine in a fairy tale, each illuminated by their own light, captured moons that they carry before them to see where they are going.

The buildings tower so high above her she wonders how she has not seen their spires winking above the waves at low tide. They too appear lit from within, shining with the great mystery of all that is crafted by the sea. She drifts through the city, shells litter the streets like cobblestones.

Each step she takes becomes more hollow, until she is floating, buoyed by the water to a window that glows brighter than the rest. The city holds its breath.

She is struck by how there is no wood to be seen. It would decay too quickly here. So different from the village that her father is helping to rebuild with wood and iron, steel and sweat.

A massive shadow passes over her and she flinches, sure this is the end. She looks up at the smooth belly of a whale. It sweeps past, circles back once, twice. She's sure it means to swallow her whole like that story her father used to read to her before bed. It passes. She finds herself standing on glass, walled in by glass. She stands inside one of the great towers. Beneath her feet the city heaves, restless as she. Lighted creatures swarm around her, curious eyes probe her skin. Before her stands a seal, its pelt is silver, speckled with iridescence.

She startles and takes a step back but her legs have dissipated. She can't look down to make sure they're still there; her neck is fixed in place. She struggles against the fear rising in her until the shining seal touches her cheek with its flipper. She is stunned into stillness.

A dark pool opens up in the seal's chest, a looking glass. Her gaze is pulled to it the same way her body was pulled into the sea. Held suspended in the glass, like a leaf floating atop a pond, is an image of the cliffs. A graceful woman in a dress that billows, cloudlike, behind her as she climbs. Ripples distort the image as the woman falls from the cliffs to the rocks below. When the ripples clear a man stands in her place, his red shirt vivid against the blues and greys. The

ripples wash him away and then it is her own image that she sees, dangling in the mirror as if by a thread. The thread unwinds and she falls, limbs thrashing.

And then she swims.

Now she stands here, overcome with the temptation to turn around and decipher what trick of the light is able to show her an image of herself from behind as though a watchful eye hovers just behind and above her.

The image zooms in and blurs. She feels her skin being stretched, as though to make room for another soul. And then staring back at her is her own reflection with another face shifting just behind it.

She can no longer think in words. Her sight grows murky and dark, a thundercloud blotting out the sun, and yet, motion registers more precisely, slowed down. Sound reaches her ears both more hollowed out, and somehow amplified. She can feel every undulation of the water against her skin; it tells her how to move. She tastes everything she smells as though her tongue has touched it. She opens her mouth to test the denseness of the saltwater; she swallows, three big gulps and does not feel sick. She feels lifted.

The seal rises above her, up and up until the weight of the water presses down less and less. Their heads break the surface, a sound like glass breaking in an empty room. A word comes back into her mind: mother.

The doe-soft eyes of the seal are gone, replaced by glinting obsidian eyes, hard and distant as starlight. The skin, pale and tight, unmistakeably human. The woman smiles and it's

the same smile the seal-girl sees in the mirror every day.

She reaches toward the girl's face as though to stroke it, but in that instant the first ray of dawn falls across the hand, revealing it for what it is: a flipper. The girl pulls away.

“Mother?” The woman nods, yes.“Will I see you again?” Again, yes.

A look passses between them, as long and searching as a lighthouse beam penetrating the night heavy atop the sea. A look of questions left unanswered.

A wave breaks between them, pushing them apart. One back to land, the other out to sea.

The old woman found her tangled in kelp and seafoam. Her knobby fingers worked to peel the rubbery skin from around the girl's mouth and nose and away from her cloudy eyes. The girl began to cough, her whole body convulsed in the old woman's arms. Colour flooded back into her eyes: sharp bottle green. They focussed on the old woman's face.

“What happ— what was that place you sent me to?”

“The future, darling one. All things are first born in the sea, before they come to be on land.”