30 Days 30 Stories, Installment 21, The Barrel Flats

The Barrel Flats lay on the South side of Downgil town, flat and dry and never a soul had gotten out alive they said. But for Cargill Watts, that's just what he was going for. His life had been hard, and he was ready for it to end. He had wandered for the last year and a half after his wife had died. Nothing had changed, and the ache in his heart had only worsened. He wondered often why it didn't kill him, and as he had grown
skinnier and skinnier with starvation, the dingoes seemed to have gotten closer and closer to giving him his wish.

Now wherever he went their footsteps and sniffing noses and calls of greeting seemed to follow him like so many reminders of the life to come, and he accepted their presence the same as he had eventually accepted the death of his wife: as the reality of the situation, and yet the dream of life he was trapped within and not really the
life he remembered living.

Noone had ever crossed the Barrel Flats, they said. And so he decided to give it a try.

His beans were low and he couldn't work this late in the year to stock up for a long, dry
winter to come. His whiskey, moreover, had run out.

He started across in the late afternoon. People got stuck out there, driven mad by the flat of the landscape, but he soon realized, as he had realized with his own sadness, that it was not flat as it looked. Actually, it sloped inwards. Probably the whole thing. The ground definitely sloped down under one foot and not the other. Again, like his misery, it probably also sloped toward something very deep in the middle, and the unsuspecting, therefore, were bamboozled into endlessly circling the packed dirt and sand.

Cargill kept straightly heading. He took two steps to his left every twenty steps forward, and by his innate sense, he felt that was just about right. And then the ground, the whole thing, began to slope down. Damn. Now it would have to slope back up again. He hated a climb in the dark.
He could cover, now, about four miles every hour. It had been about three when he realized the slope just started back up again. He began to pant, slightly, and heard the panting of the dogs
behind him. Hah. And they wouldn't be long now. His thighs were sore, he was thirsty, his
alcohol was gone, and more importantly, his wife would never return. That sadness bore him to the ground like no dog could have done.

He sat on the dirt and scratched, very slowly, her name on the ground in front of him, bending his fingernail and breaking out in a sweat as he said it slowly. This must be the first time since she had died.

"Maria," he breathed into the thick, deep silence, only lit by the radiance of his own eyes.

He heard the sound, like deep thunder, rumbling in the distance. Surely no storm had blown up? He wasn't sure, but stood and climbed quicker, a flash of lightning would be something akin to his mood. The dogs, he heard chirruping and keening to themselves no more than a quarter mile behind. He waded up the slope, and cast his sight beyond, to the North.

Nothing. Except... a band like silver was wending - here and there, he saw it in the dark. Shining in reflection...of what? The stars? He peered, and climbed a little higher to get a better look. Strangely, it reminded him of one of the ribbon she had worn in her dark, dark, midnight hair.

He climbed one step higher, and then, the first dog was upon him. Before the pack, young - yet he was there, and he was biting Cargill like nothing else.

Cargill fought him half-heartedly, knowing a full pack was too much for one man. The thunder was nearer, now. The thunder and a shaking. And then, after a few seconds of struggle with the angry dog, who ran off with a yip after a shove by Cargill's shoe, the water was rushing almost right beneath the toes of his shoes. Water like he had never seen before.

He looked at it, stupefied. Then he scrambled a few feet higher, until he could see it, stretching down below him now. Flash flood water. Muddy, dark, shiny, dangerous. It had saved him. He trudged to high ground wearily, and with a sigh, collapsed on safe ground.

The brush was growing, and he saw, beyond him, a tree. And he went to it, and in the morning, the shade of it sheltered him from the blazing sun, and he saw, there in the water, the shine of fish and the lifewater of plants, and behind him, the same, reflected by the end of the Barrel Flats.

30 Days 30 Stories Installment 20, Red Ribbons

I was six when I started seeing the red ribbons. Blooming knots of the most beautiful scarlet ribbons on people. Their chests, sometimes decorating their heads, once I even saw a young girl with two ribbons tied artlessly around her wrists. I used to point and look, and even talked to my parents about it. They would just assume they couldn't see what my childish eyes had seen, or that I had imagined it.
It wasn't until later that I realized what they were.
I remember the exact moment. I was eleven. Until then, I really hadn't worried about it much. But one day our older next door neighbor came out to leer at us as we were playing at the toys outside our apartment building. I didn't like this much, nor did the other kids, but what I noticed today was that he had a large and burgeoning knot of particularly scarlet ribbons gathered on his chest, and I wondered at that, because it seemed specifically odd. He was, to put it nicely, a slob. I had realized by now not to mention the red ribbons, that they were just for me, but I hadn't worried about it much.
But I saw him and later that afternoon, an ambulance had come to our door. It came out through the apartment gossip that he had died in his apartment of a massive coronary. Ah. It came with a sickening and very certain thud in my stomach. And then I knew what they meant.
I tried not to let it worry me. I dropped hints to some of my friends that their parents should see a doctor sometimes, when I started seeing little red ribbons floating somewhere. But it usually didn't work. I was really sad when I realized that the little red bow in my grandmother's hair was a brain tumor. But we had a little time to say goodbye, at least. She was very old, at the very least.
But when I was dating a guy - seriously - in university, and saw the red ribbons, I was absolutely floored. And devastated. I went to a psychologist, not feeling there was anything better to do. Predictably, it was little help. My boyfriend had red ribbons over his chest, his stomach, his arm. I thought it would be a shooting. I warned him not to go anywhere without me. I wouldn't let him out of my sight. The red ribbons continued to flow and sway in the wind like they always did, like seaweed under water. I hated them. At night, I saw them and I would begin to cry. He would hold me, not knowing what to do. I tried to break it to him. I had a feeling of dread, I said. I wanted him with me always, I said. Please don't leave me, I even said. It was a testament to his love that he didn't actually run out - because I sounded rather deranged. But finally, I broke down and just told him. He did leave then. For a little. But he came back, and asked me if I had seen a psychologist, and I broke down into tears again. There was really nothing I could do.
I stuck with him, though. I really did follow him everywhere. I had my cellphone on all the time. The red ribbons were looking angry the following morning. I thought "this is it." I wondered for a split second if we should call his family to say goodbye. That was crazy. But this all was crazy!
I went to class that morning with a sinking feeling.
He went to class that morning whistling. I lingered with his hand in mine outside his classroom. Then I went to mine. I had a midterm that day. I hurried through it, I remember that, then I sprinted back to his classroom and waited outside. It was a big lecture class. I decided to slip in. It was dark at the upper doors, and few people would notice. I said a whispered apology to the professor. There was my boyfriend, with the red ribbons. And many, many others I saw. All with angry ribbons flaring from them. This couldn't be about to happen. It couldn't.
Crazy? Or dead? Or...? What the hell was I going to do?
I sauntered down the stairs to the large area where the professor was lecturing (quite expertly) on biophysics. I went to the professor. He had stopped, midspeech, his mouth hanging open. I approached him, quietly, and went to his ear. I told him I had reason to believe someone had a gun. He didn't react well. But I wasn't joking. He started dialing his phone for security. The break in the lecture had upset everyone - things were not going according to plan. Who could it be? I followed my eyes to all of those without the angry ribbons. There were quite a few (thank god) but too many to know who the culprit could be. And he could very well want to commit suicide after.
At that moment, the shooter got up and started shooting.
I had never heard so much noise in my life. And then I realized, as a red ribbon bloomed on me, I would never get to hear it again. I looked at the red on my stomach. The ribbon looked exactly like my blood. Everything was very fuzzy. At that moment, there was shouting from outside and the doors burst open, well-armored cops came rushing in. I passed out.
I woke up in the hospital. It was full of college students - at least near me. I closed my eyes. I certainly had changed things. Perhaps this sense wasn't so certain. Maybe it was just a risk. Red ribbons still floated on some. Others looked to be ok. I couldn't see my boyfriend, which was really what I wanted.
But I did understand something, with a start. I was alive. My stomach was bandaged, my clothes somewhere else. I was on oxygen and an IV. I realized, perhaps, that things might be better than I imagined.
It was a few hours later, as I drifted in and out of conscious thought, that I found out how my boyfriend was doing. He was alive; but just. He was in a coma. I had changed the course of events. But for the better? I didn't know.
They said that the phone call saved lives. I'm glad if it did. But I still blame myself for my boyfriend's coma, his eventual waking, his slow and painful recovery. He is still here, but he is not the same. The person I loved did die that day, of gunshot wounds. The red ribbons were right about that.

30 Days 30 Stories, Installment 20, The Pale Sisters

A tapestry hung in the large dining room. A unicorn, a rainbow, a lion, and two ladies with the strangely white-ish silver faces of medieval embroidery lay, as they had for ages, upon the wall. It was a very old tapestry, it was not a copy. It had come to the lady of the house through her relatives; her great aunt had left it to her in her will. The dining room was large, but fairly humble. It was the meeting place of the family, and sometimes a broader set of people from the community at large.
The pale ladies hung upon the tapestry, one in the front, looking toward the edge of the hanging, and the other, behind her, peering curiously, somewhat possessively, over her shoulder. They were a pair; they seemed to relate to each other silently, without really having to acknowledge each other's presence.
They had hung on the lady's wall for ten years now. They were not a new addition. And they had watched the proceedings in the lady's house for that whole period. They had watched, observed, and thought about it deeply.
It was the eve of the day that the lady's daughter left for college. There was a strange sort of mood in the household. She had been a good student in high school and now she had been accepted to a high-ranked university in the region. She was angling for something in engineering.
The ladies had watched, perturbed.
The daughter was a good and studious girl. She was positive and popular, and over everything, quite confident. She wanted to help others, but she also wanted a good paycheck. She wanted security, and she knew the best way to get this was through a good education, a good job, and a steady career.
The ladies watched, perturbed.
The problem was - and perhaps it was not a problem to her mother, or to her mother's good friend, Steve - the girl had no passion, and she had no great desires. She liked engineering: she was good at it, and that was natural, she supposed. It was like showering. But noone had a passion for showering, at least not usually.
And so the ladies, when noone was listening, whispered to each other, concerned. How was she to find herself in thirty years? (And to the ladies, this was quite a short period of time - just around the corner, in fact.) How would she like a life she realized had not been lived? That was seriously upsetting.
They didn't know what to do. But Adelaide, the one behind, had a sudden idea. Katherine, the one in front, nodded in mute agreement. Adelaide climbed down from the tapestry that night. She rolled it up, she put it in the girl's large duffle bag.
Noone noticed the absence in the great shuffle that was the girl's departure for school. They left the house, and they arrived at the university. Adelaide hired a cab, and paid with the gold from her belt. The cabbie nearly didn't take it, but he thought it better not to naysay a woman who looked so crazy.
When the girl was finally in her room, her parents gone, that evening, she was surprised by Adelaide at the door. Adelaide was tall, and winsome, but not particularly beautiful. However, she had the same glowing confidence in her brown eyes that the girl had, and a definite sense of mischief. She asked if the girl had found the tapestry.
That night, the girl did not know what to do, but Adelaide and Katherine decided that a good rolicking party was just what was in order; so they went out and found one.
The girl trailed behind, watching the two - conversing almost wordlessly - both dressed in her best party clothes. She was bemused, uncertain, and rather irate.
They decided, as a group, to go the arts building to do some mischief. Adelaide and Katherine, though both having a wonderful time, were keeping a close watch on the girl. If the chance for passion was going to come, it would come now. They slipped in through the cracks of the closed windows (tapestry thinness did have its pluses from time to time) and unlocked the doors. Then Adelaide very carelessly fell into the girl, just as she was passing.
Katherine ran and angled a light into the great, windowed halls.
All around her, paintings and sculpture met the girl. There had been painting classes at high school, but nothing like this. Nothing like these sculptures, done by students and non-students alike, nothing like any of it she walked like she was in a dream.
That night, the two sisters climbed back into the folded tapestry, again dressed in their medeival garb. But on Katherine's wrist hung a bangle of the girl's and Adelaid had carelessly left a tell-tale shade of lipstick upon her lips.
The girl awoke the next day and put the tapestry in a corner, carefully, to return (gingerly) to her mother. But eventually, due to the lack of decorations in her suitcase, the tapestry made it up onto her wall. And the sisters figured, prominently in many of the following pieces that the girl created - engineering and art are really so close to each other, and when at university, there is no reason not to try for two goals at once.

30 Days 30 Stories, Installment 19, Bejeweled

She had never dreamt of such excess as she saw in his house. Involved with a man twice her age and three times her intelligence level (she was certain), she found herself on a long weekend with someone who she barely knew. And his house was a palace - a castle wonderland of rather atrocious size, she was a little afraid and very, very overwhelmed. There was nice and classy in that hotel that has five stars by its name way, and then there was this... loads of antiques, ancient game heads littering the wall, stiff finery, and many many priceless pieces. It was beautiful in an upsetting way and not very comfortable. She woke up in his bed, with him gone, and a slight smell of must and cologne. The house was centuries old.
She wandered out into the grounds that day. Peacocks were kept there, she could hear their cries, but did not see them. It was an overcast day, and the gardens seemed stifling. Well-planned, or well un-planned, they were artfully artless from time to time, but it was easy to see the touch of the gardeners everywhere, from hothouse rareties transplanted for the warmth of summer out into the open, to perfectly pruned trees. She meandered through the garden, bespelled. She looked around, but eventually got lost. It took her a long time to find her way back.
The weekend, she knew, was just a weekend. And she was ok with that. That was the way it was in the movies, in the tv shows. It was the social norm and she was well aware. A weekend on a yacht, in a mansion, in the glamour of richness and then it all went away, and one was cinderella again, without the slipper and the pumpkin smashed. However, this time, she was looking forward to the pumpkin smashing. It seemed a little frightening to her at the moment - too big, and too sparkly, and too magical. She couldn't wait to get back to her spare and clean little apartment in the neither clean nor safe neighborhood in which she lived. She hoped her cat was alright.
That night she met him for dinner. Even while on weekend he was busy, and had been making telephone calls and sending emails all day. He looked stressed, and tired - older than even usual. He was like a lion, you know, but all silver. He had really entranced her with his sense of being alive - his sense of living. And he still had it. How he kept it in this house, she didn't know.
He asked her about her day, and she told him it had been leisurely. She also told him bluntly, that she was rather lonely. She understood he had business affairs, the weekend was lovely, but she did not think she would be coming back. He looked at her, startled, and then smiled a brilliant, breathtaking smile. He was most assuredly one of those men who got more handsome as they aged, not less. She wished wistfully that she was the same.
He laughed and threw back his head and seemed to accede to this, and she smiled and they did have a lovely night. He was older than her by far, but his experience was therefore greater, and so her enjoyment was also.
He returned her to her apartment on Monday morning, in time for work that afternoon. Her waitressing job didn't pay much, but she did her best, and worked a lot. She went to the gym that day, dressed for work, and headed in.
She was angry to see he was at one of her tables. She had cut him off; this was indeed one of his favorite spots to eat (how else would they have gotten to know each other?) but her table? It seemed slightly tactless. And he was looking more brilliant than ever. How did he endlessly look like the most intelligent person in the world?
He looked at her with sparkling eyes and she melted at him. She did like him a great deal. Here in town they were not so far apart as when they were at his "country house."
The weeks flew past, and he was courting her, without a doubt.
The ring came in a few months. He had not met her friends, she had not met his. But she looked at him, and saw a future of rosy, glowing moments, held in his very certain and self-assured arms, and let him slide it onto his finger.
She tried to take it off that night for a shower, and it wouldn't come. But she didn't worry too much.
The wedding was being planned for some months hence; she was quite happy, though nervous and worried about their social groups. But when she was with him (in his town car, at the opera, in his flat high above the city), she felt beautiful, endlessly sexy, and self-assured. Like she had never felt before, in fact.
He showered her with jewels. Earrings: diamonds studs, bracelet: tennis and VERY expensive. Every time she put them on, she didn't want to take them off, and since he was paying her rent now, it really wasn't necessary.
Except, of course. THAT night. After another rare and overpriced trinket, they had a fight. She wanted kids. Why had they not discussed this? He didn't. He definitely didn't. She cried, and she walked away from him, and she didn't want to talk to him. She tried to take off the jewels, but they stuck, like glue. It was as if they were holding onto her. She didn't want them any more. Not only had they fought, he had been very, very cruel. He had asked her quite clearly why he would want to have children at his age with someone like her. Like her? She was just a toy was a clear and blinding realization.
But the jewels wouldn't leave, and neither would he. She didn't want either of them - at first. Until the stress of losing him, her job, her life, all swept over her. She returned, like a puppy, happy at least to be his plaything.
The jewels grew over the years. They built upon her. She literally became laden with them. They were expensive, and beautiful, and they wouldn't come off. And she learned to live with the weight of the rings on her fingers, and the pearls around her neck, and she learned to live with other things, too. Many things she had not thought of, she had not anticipated.
She was, quite literally, bejeweled.
The night he died was a solemn one. He was old, and decrepit, and his eyes were fierce now with anger at his fate, not self-assured. And he looked at her, bejeweled in his wealth, and he began to cry, angry tears.
He cried at her, and beckoned her close, and looking at her, he said quite clearly "I hate you."
She staggered back, and as she did so, she saw his eyes soften. A ring loosened and dropped from her finger. "You didn't make me happy, and I made you miserable," he said, clearly again, and the tiara fell from her head. He was smiling now - he looked light, elated. He continued on, with every word, a weight fell from her.
Finally, she was bare, and felt herself for once in the twenty years they had been wed. She came to his bedside. She clasped his hand.
She was not crying, but she looked at him with a small smile. "Thank you," she replied to all of this simply, and he patted her hand calmly, and drifted off to sleep. He never awoke.

30 Days 30 Stories, Installment 18, Why the Basil Plant Lived

It may not seem like very much, just a life. But for me the day the basil plant lived was a wonderful day in my life. It meant mercy, and it meant redemption, and it meant that I could go on.

I wasn't doing very well. My boyfriend, who I had been living with for some years, had left me, and I had been laid off in a horrible economy. I wasn't sure what to do, and I really wasn't sure how to do it. But somehow I did - I was looking for a job, I moved in temporarily, with a friend for some minimal rent and took up a temp job. And I stopped crying and eating ice cream for dinner every night after a few months.

My cat was old, but she was loyal. She would often sit on my lap, and purr, and be generally nice to me when I was sniveling with self-loathing. It took a while of cat/ice-cream/movie therapy, but I did start actually making dinner again. Finally.

And so I bought a basil plant. They are simple, easy plants (usually) and I thought it really wouldn't be very difficult to care for. I watered it, I fed it with some mulch. That's all they need. But then my ex called. Everything shut down for about a week. I forgot everything. My cat is really lucky she even got her food dish filled a few times. He was getting married, and I was miserable, and everything was absolutely horrible. And I had killed my basil plant, I thought.

I sat there, looking blankly at it, my eyes filling with tears (again). This wasn't possible. Everything gone with a few horrible words. Well, wonderful for them, I guessed. But not for me, now hidden in a little sterile corner of never-ending gloom, accompanied by my dry and dead basil plant. It's leaves looked completely wilted, and the stems drooped horribly. It was like a spider that had curled up in the corner, dead.

I realized suddenly that the horrible noise in my ears was my cat's loud meows, so I filled up her empty water dish, and moving back to put it down, broke it. I swore, my cat ran, and water was everywhere, it seemed to have splashed on every possible surface in the kitchen; I even saw drops of it on the window pane. I didn't have the heart to clean it up. I left the pieces where they were, and filled up a shallow cereal bowl for Lucy, set it down in the clear, and went back to bed.

The next day was Sunday, and when I went to get a drink of water, my feet crunched on glass in their slippers. I nearly started crying again. Then I looked at the basil plant. It was perkier, it was happier, it needed water, but it was altogether doing much better. It seemed back from the dead. And so, perhaps, was I.

The reason why the basil plant lived, of course, is pretty clear - water can do miraculous things - but it is also because I think I needed it to live. It lived and so I had some hope. And a little hope, like a little water, can do quite a bit.

30 Days 30 Stories, Installment 17, The Laughs Column

She was in charge of the laugh column in the newspaper (as well as a few other mundane ones, such as the cooking beat), but she wasn't really a humorous person, as it turned out. Her life wasn't made up of anything particularly laughable, except, perhaps, her need to constantly do a dish after she got it dirty. She mainly scanned through lesser newspapers, through comics, and sent things to print that she thought would appeal to the masses. It was not, actually, her sense of humor, but rather her knowledge of what was normal that made her a somewhat successful editor of the laughs column. Little stories, vignettes, cute and American things, things about silly dogs or cats (animals always went over well) and childhood mishaps, spilled soup. Nothing really important, nothing on the edge. Everything in its place.

Except one day she went home and everything was NOT in its place. She had been robbed, and everything had been stolen, everything. Her mother's silver, which she, being the last of her mother's line, had received, her computer, her tv, her other unimportant technologia, but many of her beautiful books, her vinyls which had been her father's, and a collection of lovely and somewhat valuable knick-knacks from her grandmother, as well as the one important piece of art she had ever owned; a small study by Monet, which she was quite sure was real.

She looked about, stupefied by the chaos, a chaos like she had never known before. Was it really possible, in HER apartment, in HER little corner of everything? She sat down by the telephone, and eventually called the police.

It was quite a few hours until the policeman came, and he wasn't very excited about it. He was actually a little rude. And his mustache bristled just like a policeman from those comics of the early 1900s. That was a little funny, she thought, as he stood there huffing like a giant rhino after climbing her steep steps. He really didn't care, and the travesty of it all struck her as rather funny. The next day, she wrote up a little description of what had happened, all rhino and thoughts of him in a bobby's hat with a large wooden club and running fruitlessly and angrily after her gang of poor, probably low-income thieves who were (most likely) fencing her few belongings for drugs. It struck her as rather funny, and she giggled to herself - a little bit of a rusty sound, really, but very pleasant in her throat - and then sent her email to the pagesetter with the day's column.

The next day, it was clear there had been a mixup. The wrong story had gone out, and instead of her gathered rights to story about a Christmas gone wrong, her story had been sent out. She was not pleased, and neither was her editor. However, noone said anything here or there, so she didn't worry about it much.

The next thing that happened was a little strange. She was unlocking her apartment door when a young man came up to her. He seemed awkward.
"Hey," he said, quietly.
"Hello," she replied, hoping very much that he wasn't going to try to sell her weed. Did she really look like the type? She held her purse imperceptibly closer.
"I... uh... I read that story."
"What?" she was quite shocked, really.
"I..." he looked up at her "you know, read your story, that weird column."
"Ah. And... um... what did you think?" She asked the question as if asking whether she should ask the question.
"Well, I think I know the guys who did it, you know - just telling you. Anyways, they're not around her anymore, but they used to live in this building."
"Ah," she didn't know what to say. Was there a reason he was telling her this story.
"I... just really liked your policeman."
"Ah," she said again. "um... well, would you think about maybe telling the police you have a tip? Or phoning one in anonymously?" she proffered.
"No way," he said. "I... don't think so, anyways." He turned, his hands in his pockets. He was the twenties caricature of a man, a young man, smoking hard, trying to be a man. His pants were baggy, his hands thrust into them as if trying to get out the bottom, like there might be gold underneath the pockets.
"Ok," she said. "Well - thanks!" She went up her steps, and then turned around, uncertain. "Hey - could I get your name?"
"uh... Steve," he said, noncommitally, and she didn't really believe him.

Another day, another column she wrote herself. This time, she didn't send it to the pagesetter. But she was approached at the end of the week by her section editor, asking her to pen another column. Apparently there had been vaguely positive feedback, which was a vast improvement on the completely nonexistant feedback before. She nodded, and quickly submitted her page on the poor boy with the grim, older-than-himself expression.

He came back the day after the column was printed. He was upset that she had written about their encounter, but she quickly apologized - she really hadn't anticipated he would care about it. Then he said something rather strange - he asked her if she wanted her little painting back. He had found it around the corner, where there were a few other of her things, dumped. She looked at him, dumbfounded. "Yes," she said without hesitation.

The painting was slightly begrimed, but generally not worse for wear. The next day she asked Steve to go out to coffee with her, and tell her about him. It wasn't long before she found him a good scholarship to college.

The laughs column dried up the next quarter - apparently not interesting enough with its drivel to really inspire anyone to keep it going. But she did get a chance to write more, as her set of bookend experiences - the old cop and the youth gang, the youth who resembled an older age - were bought by a magazine with the prospect of more in the same vein. She felt she could do that, perhaps. Especially now as she was sure to visit Stephen at college one of these days, to see how he was getting on in his dorm, and doubtlessly buy him a much-desired full meal.

30 Days 30 Stories, Installment 16, The Piers

There were once five daughters of a fisherman. They were all lovely, tall and graceful. They lived by the sea, and the sea was their life. They each were sworn to love their father, and had each taken an oath never to get married to men of the sea, for the sea was a jealous mistress, and never returned her lovers to the arms of their wives. And yet, inevitably, each one succumbed to the souls of sailors, each began to love and after beginning, could not stop.

They waited always with unease when their lovers went to sea, and held each other in fear when storms blew up. With their waiting hours they didn't know what to do, so they finally began to go down to the sea, and wait upon the shore. But the shore often receded, as tides came and went, and the water might almost drown them if there was a storm. And so, slowly but surely, they began to move toward a dusky part of the beaches, where the rocks went down to meet the sea, and there they perched upon the great boulders, which acted as piers when the men came in in their fishing boats, wet and sodden and carrying fish. They came to the piers, and the women leapt to the unsteady vessels, and they came to shore to unload their catch after a night upon the water, or an evening in the wind.

The boulders, as they cascaded down to sea, became known to the girls as the Piers, and there, on their five chosen rocks, they would wait after the cleaning and the sewing and cooking was (mostly) done.

The youngest had fallen in love with a pearl diver. It was dangerous work, and he was a dangerous soul. But she loved him, and he her. And when he found his cache of pearls he would be very rich, and they would buy a large ship and sail around the world together. So they had dreamt, and so, of course, it would be. The night was rough, but the moon was out. The coves were full with water, but the tide was out. These were the nights he left to dive for pearls, and these were the nights she moved down to the Piers to wait upon him.

She curled there, in the grasp of a damp rock, her wraps about her to ward off the chill, and listened to the dangerous rumble of the waves upon the rocks. There, deep in the deep of it, the ocean had stolen her mother - her mother, who when her father had not returned from a fishing trip for a week, had thrown herself from one of the high cliffs in despair. And there, too, lay her uncle, her grandfather, and his grandfather. Their bones mouldering. Perhaps it would be her fate too, someday, she thought, but tucked the thought away, as the feeling of being on the edge of something very high, with the water crashing out so deep and strongly, came upon her. She was on the edge of the world here, on the edge of the thing deeper and greater than the highest mountains and the lowest valleys, and within it her lover swam.

She was finally lulled to sleep by the crashing waves, unwisely, as she had been admonished not to do so many times by her sisters. She was trapped upon the rock, as the waves buffetted about her, and she would not last here. She knew the tide came up above the rock, and in such waters she was not safe with the currents. She realized that perhaps her thoughts were right, and fear gripped her; great fear, demon fear, running through her veins like acid and fire, and then, just as quickly, icy numb. If she was to survive, which of course she could not, she would have to swim. And that as quickly as she could. The tide was going in, it might push her toward the shore - and if she washed up broken, she would at the very least be broken upon the shore.

She undressed, the full moon shining upon her white white skin as if it was a reflection of the moon itself, smiling at her, as if she was a night sea creater like all the rest the moon watched. But she was not a sea creature. She was alive, very alive like a human. And nothing else.

She dived into water like a silver fish, at once pulled by the currents out, and then pushed, mercilessly, back in. She had waited so many hours on the Piers, but nothing could have prepared her for what was below them. Black and dark and fear. And through the water she made out the moon, and her own hands like ghosts against the dark, drowning waters. It was as if she was already dead. What was below? Nothing. And above? Impossibility.

She was pushed against the ragged edge of a stone, which felt like torn metal in the cold, and she surfaced for a moment, the edge of the sea that met the air seemed more frightening for a moment, like another world of unknown, the blank mask of something that from underneath looked huge and unfathomable, but from above was covered as if by a wall of silver, from which anything could erupt, from which anything could arise - and into which anything could fall and never return. She began to swim, terrified, toward the dark shore, shining where the surf hit it, but showing little else.

After minutes of struggle, she realized dumbly that she would not make it. But she did not stop. Better to die fighting... better to die... she slipped beneath the waves more and more, sucked down by a fierce tide, until she only had sips of air between long hours of water. Until, fighting like a fish on the shore, she drank instead of breathed, until she felt herself dieing, the white moon still smiling upon her white flesh delightedly. Her pearl diver nowhere to be seen.

Her head banged the rock of the Pier, she could not raise it. A voice called to her, but she couldn't hear it. A dark hand lifted her onto the rocks, a dark seaweed-covered hand lifted her, and gasping in the air as if it could not breathe, it put her high upon the Pier, where the moon reflected her like silver. And the dark face, covered in mire, with it's waving hair and its eyes, just like hers, crying seasalt tears, ducked beneath the surface, breathing there, and then, crawled upon the stone, to caress her hair for one moment, her hair the color that the creature's had once been. Until it slipped, quiet, back into the water, and disappeared beneath the Piers, until the waves crashed up to the rock, where the girl lay, but could not touch her with its foamy fingers.

The pearl diver came home that night to find her upon the rock, not quite dead, and tenderly, he laid his pearl on the bottom of the boat, and rowed home. He put her in his bed, and covered her with his body, and she woke that morning in the arms of him, in the arms of life.

He left the sea that day. He left the sea, and they moved to another shore, where he did not dive for pearls anymore, but instead grew wheat and corn and other things on the edge of the sea, on the edge of the water, planting in the ground the pearls of life, instead of harvesting the pearls of things by death, and watching with wonder as the pearls became the food and the houses and the clothing of his family, the happiness of his pearl, his wife, the sparkling eyes of his children and the sweet-smelling fur of their cat.