At the Touch of the Shore

I gather the spoils left on the beach, rinsing them in the sea and placing them reverently in my bag. It is heavy, and it stinks and seeps with blood and saltwater.

I know he is watching me. He always is. I wait for the day he runs back to town with his tales, but I have not yet been taken away, so I let him stay. At a distance. He should not be making my hair stand on end as his footsteps press into the wet sand behind me.

I turn and bump face first into his chest. He looks down his nose and I am ready to run. I have not collected everything I need for the day, but I am not against scarpering, if I must. Something will be better than nothing.

He makes to move and my toes curl in my shoes, preparing to dash, but he simply falls to his knees before me.

I look around, but there is only sand and sea and grass. I try to urge him up but he pulls his arms free to hold up a bunch of flowers, their purples and reds hideously garish in the grey of the coast.

As his fingers shake, he asks me to marry him, and the chunk of whale I had grasped in my hands falls to the sand.

I do not answer him. I pick up my whale and I wash it in the sea and I place it in my bag, saltwater blooming across the fabric. He watches, but I do not spare him a glance as I walk away.

At home, I wash the lumps of flesh and bone and organs in the sink, boil them, and then carry them gently to the bedroom. The curtains are closed, but my eyes are used to the grey, and the thick, raspy breaths guide me.

The first few spoons I must feed myself, raising the spoon to the thin, crumbling lips, but after a taste my wife soon grasps the bowl in her fingers of mostly bone, and devours alone. I sit on the wooden chair beside the bed and I listen to her slobbering and slurping. I know that when I hold her she will be splattered in blood and I know that her mouth will reek when I lower mine to hers, but I know it will not disgust me as much as the sight of a man on his knees before me.

In the night, one washes up entirely. I cannot say how I know, but I sense it as I am holding her stinking, damp body, and, when I roll over, her eyes are open, the soul in them brighter than I have seen for years. I stand beside the bed and I crouch for her, and instinctively, trustingly, she crawls out of the sheets and clambers onto my back.

She is all around me as I stumble to the beach, my bare feet catching on nettles and harsh grass, and I shake as I lower her gently to the shore. Not for my aching muscles, but for my heart which pines at having had her so tightly around me and for having to let her go.

It knows.

It always knows.

Her feet touch the sand and she scurries away from me, crouching over the mammoth body of the whale and starting to eat. She does not look back.

The man is there. Through the chill of the night and my wife’s guzzling I watch him watching us.

It is not until the weak tendrils of sunlight start to sneak through the grey of the sea that he leaves. I watch his back disappear into the distance, wondering if he will tell, and then I turn back to my wife. My beautiful wife. Hunched over, sand stuck to the delicate knees that once bent for me and to the soft hands that once held me. Blood and guts dribbling down her chin, spilling from the mouth that once kissed every inch of me.

I cannot let them take her.

I pull the knife from my belt, always with me, lest I need to cut her some dinner, and I kneel beside her, sand sticking to my knees, too. Silently, she watches as I hack into the thick flesh of the beast, bitten and torn by her teeth, and etch out a space in the mortality. She does not resist me when I place one arm under her legs and one around her back, and she comes away from the sand so easily, despite her full belly. When I place her gently inside the blood and the guts her eyes see me clearly, just as they used to, piercing me and knowing me and thanking me. Loving me.

Staring down at what once was mine, I push until my legs ache with the weight of the leviathan. Agonised, I wail into the grey, distraught and defeated, but, like an angel, the tide moves towards us, the sea taking what it had given and accepting what I had offered in return.

I stand, and I watch the pod on the edges of life, calling them back, and I know she is gone.

The man returns, but the ones with him shake their heads at the small splutterings of gore on the shore. They leave, laughing, but he stays. I feel him watching me. Days. Weeks. Months.

He watches and I do not move and I hope that when I shrivel up and die, he will push me out to sea, too.