The shore folk gather at low tide on the bitter January beach. Acres of sand flats spread before them, deep-scored with ripple marks, the rank-rot taste of seaweed in the air. The wet mass of muck and sand slurps at their bound-and-boarded feet: they retreat and step, retreat and step, carrying their own dry land with them, moving to stay in place.
You will not catch them today.
The crowd surveys the humped shapes of sunken flotilla, your midden of shipwrecked leavings. Toppled masts of splintered oak poke through the flats at groyne-height. The heel of a halved hull shows itself, torn loaf-like between vast hands. Scatterings of rope, once thick as a man’s thigh, are softened to silk fronds by your heave and wash. A girl points out ship figureheads to her infant brother: busts whittled as toothpicks, barely breaking the surface.
The Beseeching begins. The torchbearers light driftwood fires along your margin, marking the line where solid land shifts and melts away. They are not fooled by your guising; your tufts of seagrass; the innocent line of your distant swash.
As one, they read out the names of your catches: fishing smacks, trading vessels, battle ships. The map-keeper notes down each new taking. They cannot record the names of the dead. They are mostly strangers. And they are too many. No matter how bright their warning fires, how loud their cries and drumming, the shore folk cannot outwit you.
All have witnessed you suck a victim down, parting the buried ridges of your terrible lips: a tsunami of saltwater sweeping ashore as you open; the chasm of your throat closing again over the catch.
The Beseeching call stretches out, a listing of lost vessels, a deep keening for another year of death. The voices of the crowd are thinned by sharp stings of wind, whipping the wood smoke. They shout to you across the vastness of sky and weather. You roar back.
When the Beseeching is over they throw you cakes, as far as their arms can reach, and beg for mercy. Always hungry, you suck down their offerings.
As the tide turns the shore folk retreat, wary-eyed, walking backwards on paddled feet. Some of them must put out to sea again in the morning, but today, the nets stay empty.
Issue 5
COLD WAVE
Sonia Overall is a writer, psychogeographer, and academic living in East Kent. Her writing includes novels, poetry, non-fiction, and academic articles, many of which touch on psychogeography, spirit of place, and aspects of the weird. Sonia’s novel Eden was published in 2022.