Salt Water Tears by Hopkins Brian A

Author:Hopkins, Brian A [Hopkins, Brian A]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction.Horror, Short Fiction, Collection.Single Author
ISBN: 9781888993219
Google: UzEIAAAACAAJ
Amazon: 1888993219
Barnesnoble: 1888993219
Goodreads: 658776
Publisher: Dark Regions Pr
Published: 2015-10-03T04:00:00+00:00

Authors Note: Readers familiar with my novella Cold at Heart (Starlanee Publications, 1997), will recall that Gabe, the shape-shifting monster who had gone north to hibernate in the 1800s, mentioned a mate which had gone south. Her name is Wisteria. Ice Castles, the sequel to Cold at Heart, tells Wisteria’s story. This is an excerpt from her journey to Antarctica. Many thanks to Sylvie Miller in Paris for helping to correct my French.

Flotsam

* * *

She washed up in their surf, this whale of a woman, bobbing and rolling all bloated and white... like a dead beluga, or an oversized, discarded milk carton. But she wasn’t a beluga, was in fact nothing that had come from their ocean—leastwise not in the last several millennia. She wasn’t garbage either. As the surf ground her against the sand and the shell-wash, flesh and blood permeated the saltwater. They could taste her. It was the taste of castoff, of rejection, of loneliness and despair and misuse, but mostly it just tasted of death.

“Have we seen this one before?” asked Swift, hoping for past history from which to derive some preliminary hypothesis. Where had she originated? What land-locked currents had brought her to their sea?

Dancer ran a quick search of the Collective, checking for any past sighting, the woman as a child perhaps, standing cautiously with the waves breaking around her waist and her tiny hand clenched in an adult’s, or as a teenager, frolicking with giggling girlfriends and vociferous boys. The Collective was a compendium of these sightings, passed from generation to generation, from one cetacean species to another, constantly updated as pods encountered each other on the migratory routes. Dancer’s search came up with nothing. Either the dead woman had never set foot in the ocean, or on a beach or pier—or no cetacean had ever seen her do so. “I think,” she told Swift, gently nudging aside his attempts to mate with her, “that we’ll have to make a new entry for her.”

“Maybe we should try pushing her back?” But Swift knew it was too late for that. From the look of it, she’d quit breathing some time ago. Her lungs were full of seawater, and he had but the most rudimentary grasp of how that fluid might be removed and replaced with air. He leaped out into the cool morning air to get a look at the beach. Even if they were successful at moving her back into her own environment, there were none of her kind around to help.

They probed her with sonar clicks, high-frequency whistles and directed pulses mapping her body as surely as any CAT scan. She was fat, but she had been fatter. In the gas-bloated tautness of her skin, they found the scar-like trails of stretch marks concentrated around hips and thighs, breasts and stomach, lighter bands against the already pale hue of her flesh. There were small scars which seemed to indicate that some of her bulk had at one time been taken by predators or parasites.

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