Afterglow by Grist

Author:Grist
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The New Press

BROKEN FROM THE COLONY

Ada M. Patterson

THE CORAL COULD NO LONGER TELL HER APART. HER BREATHING had slowed and so had her body. She knew she was running out of footsteps. A decade of walking would do that to a girl like her. The sand could sometimes catch her heels, distracting her to memory. Getting lost in who she once was and forgetting what she was becoming. That’s how the stillness found her. Surrendering to the glimmers of a life above the water. Her life before the water. Quiet. Alone. Broken whenever the current breezed through her, its chill seizing her neck and voiding her pores of plankton, algae, and grit. Cold enough to remember what real wind feels like. Standing at the peak of some hill—what was its name again? Farnham? Or was it Felicity? No, that’s just what she called the feeling. The name didn’t matter. What mattered was the breeze. The mournful sigh of the Atlantic washing over her, only ever heard in branch rattle and casuarina shivers. And she could hear them. Each green strand swept up in a thousand breaths of wind and all its loosest fruit dropping from the sky like an emptied nest of sea urchins. She was careful never to walk barefoot under casuarina trees. The unwary shock of their fruit under heel could feel like glass thrust into bone … like lionfish barbs … the thorns of a blowfish … stepping on the fangs of a reef—the wind! Remember the wind! She can’t afford to drown herself in similes. She must remember the wind. The wind cutting through her shirt. Sharp enough to remember where her nipples were. Are. Not polyps. Nipples. The ones she grew on purpose. The ones that were hers even before the changes. The changes in her body and the changes in her world. She could no longer tell them apart. The wind picking through her hair like casuarina. The Atlantic sighing with her. Staring out over that hill without a name, everything could be her. And she could be …

The current broke through. It reached into her and she remembered. She remembered where she needed to go, and she could once again pluck out all those questions that waited for her. How many days had she lost? How many footsteps did she have left? How long had the stillness claimed her? How much of her was still there buried beneath the coral? Her polyps could choke from these kinds of questions. Better to let them be carried away on the leftover gust of currents. Better to just keep moving for as long as she could. As long as her mind could outgrip the coral. How much farther was it? She tried to look through the black thicket of salt water. Any soreness would be softened by her second eyelids. She stared because she needed to know where she was. She needed to remember. Her neck hissed like shoreline avalanches when she turned to face the nearest landmark. Once, a supermarket.

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