LOOK FOR ME WHEN THE TIDE IS LOW
I
by MARISA MONTANY
f I was very lucky, I would go out once in a season. Out to sea. When the tide was pulled high, when the moon was black and near, when the sky had whipped itself into a froth and swollen the sea. On these nights, the door opened. On these nights—on this night—I kissed my starry husband goodbye and went to my black pool at the bottom of the cliffs. Carefully, I climbed down, thrilling and trembling with the crashing waves below. In my pool, I found last season’s seawater muddled with rain. The dregs of storm and tide. There was a little life there—skating bugs, yellowing leaves—but the water itself was dying, having left its salt in lonely rings on the wall to mark its dwindling days. Waiting. Waiting with me for a night such as this. I undressed, hid my clothes beneath the scrubby brush, and prepared to meet the sea. Was there any sweeter thing? I marveled as the spray misted my lashes, as my eyes slid up the flint faced waves, the rocks sharp at my back. Any sweeter thing than to know the sea yet need not fear it? I tilted my cheek into the palm of the wind as I unbound my hair. Carefully, I stepped over the rocky lip and down into my tide pool. I clutched a satchel of airy treasures to my chest and leashed it to my bicep for good measure. The sea is a rogue and a pickpocket, after all, and from the unwary it takes what it wants. The water was only ankle deep as I reclined and settled myself. Digging my toes into sand and silt, I parted my lips and closed my eyes. I could hear the waves crashing closer. Their roar pressed around me, building a pressure in my chest, until a large wave crashed over the pool’s edge and welled up around me, purging the silt, the yellowing leaves. I smiled and felt my teeth go sharp in the starlight. The water came faster then, crashing again, and again, until I was washed out to sea with those yellow leaves swirling in my wake. Just as I thought my lungs would be burned away in their desire, I felt my neck split open beneath my ears and the sea hit my blood. My body shimmered green from waist to fin. I had been pulled out to the relative calm beyond the breaking waves, and with a last look at the dark mirror of the moon, I dove down into the deep. Below me, the reef dropped off into luminescent blackness. The daylight fish were fast asleep in their coral castles, like jewels locked away in a courtesan’s chest. Seaweed winked and waved like quicksilver in the current. I swung beneath a familiar ledge to gather the sole possession of my sea-self—a bow of rippling cuttlebone strung with the sinew of a leviathan long dead. The grizzled eel who kept guard for me loomed up from the shadows like ink. I scratched him gently beneath his chin. 7
