Salt & Storm

The sky would be clear, colorless, mist blending together the air and the ocean, the waves whispering against the rocks.

Hope – that silly, stupid creature that lived within me, no matter how often I tried to beat it to death – lifted its nose and sniffed at the air.

Cursed, I was cursed, and my mother said she’d given up magic for good, said it was a terrible thing, but she wasn’t above using it to keep me at her side, and she’s a hypocrite, a liar, a fraud and phony, and I hate her I hate her I hate her!

I am swimming and it is just sunrise, the sky so gray as to be almost invisible. I rise to the surface to breathe and that’s when I see the dark shadow of a boat, gliding gently toward me in the water. Men ride in the boat, their faces grim and greedy and silent, and as I turn to watch them I feel a bite in my side, a piercing pain.

Just because it's common doesn't make it less powerful.

The ocean turns cold, dark, pressing around me, but the deeper I go the more the iron inside of me twists and pulls and I know that I’m tethered to the boat, that even now the men pull the rope tighter and drag me back to the surface.

Panic reared up through me, hot and blazing and blurry, and that was it.

This will be the night I escape. The thought repeated in my mind like a refrain, over and over, and I believed it so hard that I whispered it aloud: ‘This will be the night I escape!

I am going to be murdered. It wasn’t any easier to face in the daytime.

I stretched out on the carpet, eyes glazed over, my heart whirring with frustration and fear, and as my mother’s curse slowly, firmly, pushed my eyelids closed, my body went still. But on the inside I was screaming.

I was sixteen, still my mother’s prisoner, the night I became the whale.