Riptide

The surf hissed and splashed and sprayed salty fumes across the beach, and Kaya listened to the salty, warm, asemic sounds it said to her, as she watched the Sun set over the horizon, looking like a perpetually rupturing atomic explosion, which, she mused, was exactly what it was. The surf hissed something about the evening’s exceptional warmth, how turbulent the water was, how uncharacteristic for an evening in autumn, as it coughed up kelp and flotsam and dead fish, then burbled and shrank back from the beach to regather for the next wave.

She was sitting cooly on the sand. It was soft and warm under her bottom, and a breeze was starting to pick up her skirt from the sea. As the last glow of the fireball sank under the waves, she stood up, and looked back at her companions, whose skin now began to glow in the azure twilight cast by the moon, now rising full and large in the east. They returned her gaze with icy stares, as empty and alien as the depths of space where stars die.

It is time. Will you go? they thought at her with their eyes.

She turned back to the sea, immense, and calmly lapping at the shore, calling her in that hissing tongue it did, while the stars above and the Others looked on in anticipation with ten thousand glittering eyes. Gathering up her breath, her peace, and her courage, she undid her skirt, and padded slowly, deliberately, into the sea.

Beneath the waves, the bare shells and rocks bit at her feet, not enough to mark, but enough to make their presence known, and to remind her through their metaphor, that this was a trial of her will. She continued deeper into the water. Schools of fish darted out of her way as she startled them, then turned back to watch her pass. She felt, rather than saw their presence. Though her eyes were open, the sun had set long ago, and now even the surface was nearly black. The water was thick, anyway, a murky cloud of oils and refuse and fish guts and sand she kicked up from the bottom. But the water itself made its contents known. Through a whole sensorium, she perceived fish and sand and vegetation and currents and eddies as sounds and touch and smells, and flavor — an acrid, salty texture that stung at the back of her throat and in her nose and eyes, and yes, even as sight, which her eyes didn’t see, but perceived or imagined maybe, as a gestalt of all her other perceptions, unsatisfied to present her with the mere dim shadows of what light could actually reach her there.

Presently, she stood before a kelp forest. It stretched for miles, from the cliffs to the bay, and it teemed with life. She walked between the kelp stalks, past sharks' egg sacs, sea urchins, and so many fish, in fact, they reminded her of home, on the boat, with Papa. She thought of eating them for a moment, the warm flavor of grease washing away the sea salt on her tongue, nights by the bonfire on the deck of their barge, songs with the seamen and Papa, and the fish in the sea. Songs giving thanks for the fish having given their life as food, and for praise of the Sea in its majesty, and pleas for its grace to let them continue breathing her dry salty air, to not take them under just yet, to let them live full lives as men on land — and the thought was gone, away with the currents, replaced by the kelp on her skin, the sand on her feet, and her determination to see this through. She had walked for miles. The fish watched from a distance as she neared the edge of the kelp forest. Here, an artificial coral habitat had been erected, and they grew in abundance out of cool ceramic alcoves which would slice through skin like algae, but which could not hurt her, if the Sea would not allow it. She walked on until she reached the edge of the continental shelf. It was a sheer drop into an oppressive blackness. There was nothing that she could see, just bits of flotsam and plankton, and a few scarce coral hugging the wall near the edge, and below, nothing, for distances that her mind could not fathom, even as her soul knew exactly what lay at the bottom, and she was going there. Fear gripped at her groin, and her sense of vertigo tugged so hard against her determination, it felt like it would pull her navel out through her anus. She believed in her divine self, and she believed in the Sea to protect her, but her very human body was not ready to be convinced. It bucked and winced at the thought of dissolving in those depths, becoming one of the particles of dust that floated in front of her vision. Her human body did not believe it could put itself together again.

She sat with that feeling a while, listening to it, soothing it, treating it with kindness, but a stern determination to stay put until it calmed down. She lifted her eyes to the water above, calm and warm, and gently undulating. The light of the moon shone through, casting crepuscular rays toward her from directly overhead, its light now visible past the murkiest water near the beach, with the fish and the sand and the refuse from land. She raised an arm, and with her eyes, saw the Otherlike glow coming from her amber skin, dark now, but glinting in the moonlight. She let her eyes focus past her hands, down, into the deep, where the moonlight was swallowed whole, and even the sun on the clearest day could not reach, and the fear gripped her again, tugging at her gut from inside, twisting it into knots, which she held, then loosened. She stood there and watched, and the knots untied themselves.

Whatever will come next, she thought, I will see it through, on the other side.

She breathed deep, in slowly, and out, slowly, and again a few times, then, calm — afraid, but calm — she took one foot, then the other, and she sank.