Driftwood

by E.M. Linden

I’m on this beach, and I think I might be dead. I sliced my heel on marram grass, and the blood oozed black, slow, and cool. I can see right through my hands. When I put them flat on the cold sand, I can count the grains through my palms. I can’t leave, and nobody comes.

I inscribe this letter like scrimshaw on driftwood. I feed it into the flames, so my words will write themselves in the smoke of the living world.

Bone-white dunes and a turning hawk above. Driftwood like mangled skeletons. Silvery marram grass. A world drained of colour: seafoam, fish bones, sand dollars, kelp. The sob of wind through the driftwood, the soughing sea. But over the sea’s horizon, stars.

I tell you this so that you know what to expect, after.

No one comes, but something is already here. Driftwood sculptures stand guard along the endless stretch of beach. The wind keens through their ribs and whistles through their eye sockets; it reminds me that there was once a thing called music.  

They tower over me, monstrous. This one’s spine stretches like another row of dunes. This one uncoils along the tide line. They appear and disappear overnight. In the sand, I find the tracks of whatever it is that lifts and shapes the driftwood monsters as effortlessly as I once handled matches.

I scuff the cool sand with my bare feet and wonder what the sculptures represent. Sins? Dreams? I keep my distance even from the beautiful ones, their backs smooth, necks arched like racehorses, wings graceful and powerful. Even when I am lonely, and they are almost familiar.

These are the borderlands. The beach is so long I can’t see an end to it. There’s always enough light to cast shadows. In the day, it seeps into the sky through unchanging stratus clouds, and at night the waves dance with phosphorescence. There’s no sun, no rain, and no moon, but always the turning hawk.

The only real darkness is over the sea, on the horizon, and that’s how I know the stars are there.

I build myself a rough shack for shelter. I don’t need it, but it makes me feel less exposed among the three expanses of sand, water, and sky. I use only driftwood still wet from the sea. Saltwater, I remember, cleanses. It feels like a smaller trespass than using the bone-bleached driftwood that the sculptor uses.

I never see the sculptor. To them, I’m no more than a washed-up feather or cuttlefish bone: ephemeral and beneath their notice. Not an invader, just stranded.

The hawk watches, and the sculptor builds the driftwood monsters. Guardians for the border.

Sometimes there are fires, but they are inverted, burning down into pits instead of reaching into the sky. The flames are ice-cold. The edges of the flames burn blue with salt. It is the only color I have seen for a long time. The other colors are just names to me. It’s getting harder to remember them.  

This place is close to the skin of the living world. If the living light fires there, they also burn here.

I remember the colors of the rainbow; I sing them to myself in a cracked voice as quiet as the sea breeze in the marram grass. Red, yellow, blue. Maybe there were others? Those are the ones I remember. Red. Yellow. Blue.

The wind whittles me away like driftwood. The strange, constant light bleaches my skin. My limbs twist and wear into new shapes, smoothed by the wind-blown sand.

If I stay here too long, I will be driftwood too. Maybe I will end up as part of a sculpture, some small but useful bone shaping part of the skull or a phalange. 

When I close my eyes, I see a woman. She sits on a beach like this one, but with life and colors I thought I’d forgotten: birds and sandhoppers and children playing in the waves, a blue sky with pink-tinged clouds, bright towels and plastic toys, laughter and voices and seagulls and the jingle of an ice cream van. She smells of sunscreen. She’s swum in the waves and now rests, head tipped back and eyes closed, blissful in the sun. 

As the sky darkens, she pulls a turquoise shawl around her shoulders and the people she is with kindle a fire. They unwrap greasy takeaways—fish and chips—and burn the newspaper. Children roast marshmallows and run shrieking around the circle. Someone strums a guitar. The woman stares into the flames and remembers me.

I wish I knew who she was.

I wrote to her, but I was too timid. I pulled the message out before the cold flames could send it on its way.

This is a pattern I am familiar with.

I linger on this endless beach because I was not brave enough to go past the waves to the deep water.

Every day, others pass me. At first, I thought they were shadows, but they are too detached and purposeful. They’re travelers, like me, drifting like shadows over the sand. Some hesitate at the shoreline or rest on the beach to watch the sky awhile. But all of them enter the water. They’re going to the horizon. They know there’s no other way to reach the stars.

Every day I fade and lose a little more of who I was. I can never return, and soon I will be no more than scattered driftwood. But I can’t bring myself to go into the water. To let go of life.

Not yet. I can’t go yet. I’m still not brave.

E.M. Linden (she/her) reads and writes speculative fiction. She likes coffee, ghost stories, and owls. Her work has appeared in The Deadlands, Weird Horror, Flashpoint SF and elsewhere. She has lived and worked in the Middle East and Australia but calls Aotearoa New Zealand home. She is on Mastodon at @emlinden@wandering.shop or Twitter @e_m_linden.