You walk barefoot along a deserted beach in late autumn. Briny winds tear at your hair and send your skirts whipping around your legs. The waves have washed thousands of salps onto the shoreline. You try to avoid them. Nevertheless, you occasionally feel the little transparent blobs resist and then yield beneath your feet as you trace a path along the sand.
It’s hard to tell which is darker, the sea or the sky. You climb onto the rocks and stop to sit. As each wave surges in, shattering itself against the rocks, spray dampens your face. You don’t mind, it makes you feel alive. A fork of lightning momentarily illuminates the gathering clouds, glowing starkly amidst the gloom. You look away from the brightness, glancing down into a tide pool.
You reach into the water and move a rock. Small crabs with shells the colour of dried blood quickly scatter to find new shelter. Around the edges, fronded anemones pulse. You stroke the swaying tendrils with a fingertip, and they recoil from your touch.
Tucked among the wave-smoothed rocks and half-buried in the sand and shell grit at the bottom of the pool, something catches your eye. You move more rocks, and wiggle it gently until it comes loose.
It’s an old bottle, the glass cloudy and lightly pitted. You hold it up, inspecting it in the half light. You shake it and something rattles. The wide neck of the bottle is crudely plugged with dirty wax and twine, but it looks as though no water has got inside.
You dig at the seal with a driftwood twig, scraping bits of the hardened wax onto the edge of the rock you sit on. It takes a few minutes, but eventually the neck of the bottle is cleared. You upend it.
There’s a noise like glass marbles clacking together, and a small, pale disc falls out into your hand. You let the bottle rest in your lap while you examine it. It’s ivory in colour, faintly yellowed. Bone. No, not bone. A piece of whale tooth. There’s a hole drilled into it, through which a strip of knotted leather thonging is strung.
The pendant is carved on one side, squid ink rubbed into the etched surface to bring the image to life. A woman’s face. A sweetheart. A siren.
You twine the pendant’s leather cord around your wrist. Twice, three times. Then you pick the bottle up again, peering into the neck to see if there’s anything else inside. There is. There’s something curled against the sides of the bottle, but it won’t come out.
Curving a finger into the bottle, you coax it upwards. The browned paper creases as you carefully draw it out. A note! A message in a bottle, tossed into the brine by a sailor pining for his love.
It looks old - a hundred years or more. You flatten it over your lap, hunching, squinting in the dim light. It’s written in a thin, slanting hand and the ink is watery and faded . It’s no use, you can’t make it out… but for the name at the top. Your name.
How funny, you think, your lips curving in surprised delight. The sailor’s sweetheart has the same name as me.
You hold up your wrist again to look at her likeness, the whale ivory pendant painstakingly carved by her lover through the lonely months at sea.
You trace your thumb over the carving. Strange that you did’t notice before. The face that looks back at you is your own.
annaxmalina
kianamaiart
prguitarman
areudirty
baratheonpilled
tangentwithtanner
yousharknotpass
romaincrisis
pixelskylines
