Tales from Brackish Harbor by Cassandra L. Thompson & Damon Barret Roe

Author:Cassandra L. Thompson & Damon Barret Roe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quill & Crow Publishing House

As I rowed back toward the dim lights of the wharf, with salt spray in my face and blood drying on my hands, I remembered the only other time I had come to the sea on my own.

Mother had always warned me away from the ocean. She’d never allowed me anywhere near the crashing waves that battered the rocks below our house. She had filled my head with stories of hungry sea monsters, sharp-toothed sirens, of selloh that could masquerade as men, and of things that had no names, sharp-clawed with tattered gills and lidless eyes that had seen the horrors of the nighttime depths. I never learned to swim, and my fear of the deep currents had kept me far from the shore—yet, on nights when the fog held off and the moon lit the waves, I felt its salty pull.

The shoals around the island had once provided us with a livelihood and, when I was a child, the fishing boats would come in from a few nights away loaded with fish. My mother had brokered the sailors’ catches, as sharp-minded as any of the men she worked with. One of those fishermen must have been my father, but she had never spoken of him, and I had never asked. By the time I’d married William, the boats traveled far out of sight for a week at a time, returning half-full at best. It had only gotten worse and, by the time Mother had died, leaving me alone with the man who had become a monster, William was gone for weeks at sea—longer in the autumn, when the ocean grew colder and hungrier.

The night I buried Mother, I’d come down to the sea alone. Not to the wharf, but to the secluded beach near my childhood home, where the sound of the surf had lulled me to sleep on warm summer nights. I’d sat in the darkness, salt tears mixing with the salt breeze, after the sun had made my shadow long on the sea-washed pebbles. I’d planned to walk into the churning water and never return, but cowardice had kept me on dry land, where I’d cried until sleep had taken me, and dreamed.

In my dream, a dark shadow lurked in the water, just past the breaking waves. I watched its approach, foam sliding off its back as it beached itself in the shallow surf, arching up toward the air. Scales softened to skin, webbed fingers detached from each other and, as it pulled itself onto land, its tail split into legs. It exhaled water and inhaled air. It stood then, and looked at me with blue eyes that had seen the drowning of sailors trapped in storm-battered ships, plummeting away from the light of the surface toward the endless depths.

In the way of dreams, I was paralyzed, unable to move, to blink, to breathe. This thing, this man-shaped thing from the deep, came to me on the beach. His arms were corded muscle, his chest heaving in gulps of unfamiliar air.

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