He tastes of salt. Of rockpools. Of morning mists. Of sea moss and dillisk.
But his scent is off the forest floor, of pine-needles crushed underfoot. She kisses his full mouth, his salted lips, runs her tongue down his throat, along a shoulder blade, presses her lips into his upper arm, swooning to the brine tang of him.
Oceanic, the taste of him.
When she was six or seven, her mother bought her a sea-green dress with a scalloped hem. She wore it until she split the seams.
She leans away from him, back arched and hands splayed, the better to absorb him.
‘So you’re real,’ she says, squinting into the light of him. ‘You exist, after all.’
He smiles. His eyes are ochre-flecked.
‘I saw you yesterday,’ she says looking away from him, out to sea, ‘on those far rocks. I thought you a trick of the light.’
‘I’d been watching you stumble across the shingle as though you had no feet to balance on,’ he says, laughing a little. ‘It arrested me.’
People often laugh, not unkindly, at her clumsiness, at the litany of collisions and breakages and bruises. Here, on this small beach, her beach, she often trips and slips on the barnacled rocks, cutting and pockmarking her skin.
She contemplates yesterday’s ungainly nakedness. She thinks about how, unwitting, she had been watched.
‘No-one comes here,’ she says.
‘Until now.’
‘Until now,’ she echoes.
‘Dry land isn’t your territory,’ he says, his fingers combing her tangled hair.
In the sea, she unspools, swimming for miles, diving deep down.
‘God meant you to be a penguin,’ her grandmother once told her, ‘but became distracted by one of his sunsets and mistakenly planted you in a human womb. That’s why you waddle and stumble and fall.’
Her grandmother’s family was of the Aegean but had latterly migrated to the North Atlantic.
They lie on a sun-hot rock watching the blue sky transmute to mauve and amber. To crimson. A faint moon appears.
‘I have to leave,’ he says.
There is a chop of wind against her skin. She shivers and goose-pimples. ‘You’ll come back tomorrow?’
‘The tides have been wayward’, he says, ‘bringing us too close to shore.’ Perhaps he is mirage. Perhaps she is heat-addled.
‘We belong,’ he says, ‘in the deep. Where it is wild. Where it is safe.’ Her belly churns with a thousand questions.
‘I can’t be without you,’ is all she says.
‘Then come,’ he says. ‘Come with me.’
When she was fifteen, a riptide snatched her. Inside her terror was a flash of euphoria.
Afterwards, they gave her hot chocolate with a dash of rum.
For the shock, her grandmother said.
She twists around and looks at a small house perched high above the bay, a house inherited from her dead ones, a house she retreats to every weekend, every summer, every chance she gets.
Behind the sunset-red windows, her familiar things are clustered: her lifetime’s gatherings and those of her ancestors. The things that have been kept.
She is thirty-four and childless, still. But one day she will be a sea crone, wise and wizened, teaching her grandchildren to forage for mussels and shrimps, here in this secret cove in which her grandmother sang her siren song, this tiny bay of mysteries into which her grandfather’s boat drifted, this hidden haven in which her grandparents lived out their lives, and where she will, she thinks, live out hers.
She looks up at the garden she has created, a jumble of greens and whites, of purples and pinks, of flowers and grasses and driftwoods, of rust-patterned flotsam.
Her eyes trace the pathway that snakes down from her doorway to a small wooden gate. This side of the gate lies the dense sea-grass she tramples each morning, feet skidding, heart dancing, anticipating the cold shock of the untameable ocean, the first breath-stealing plunge.
Her gaze tracks back across the flattened sea-grass, back through the gate, back up the garden path, back to the door of the house.
In this house, she sat on her grandfather’s knee, lulled by his shanties and the drift of his pipe-smoke.
She dives now through her swirling waters into the labyrinth of her mind, through the chambers of her heart, and on into the guts of herself.
‘Perhaps,’ she says to him, finally, ‘these same wayward tides will one day bring you back to me.’
Author: Rosie Morris began writing creatively in her 50s. Her short fiction and cnf has been published in journals and anthologies and achieved some success in competition. Her first novel, in the stew-pot for years, is almost ready for querying. Rosie is co-founder of Irish literary magazine, The Four Faced Liar.