By K. Wallace King
From CHM #50 August 2024
When the tide was out, the cave was filled with sand and sometimes a fish flopping helpless as a wing-ripped bird. June tried to save a beached perch. She picked it up, but the fish slipped through her hands with the feel of wiped snot. Back on the wet sand, its lidless eye stared at the white winter sun. Whatever it saw June would never see.
“Leave it. It’s almost dead,” said Jeremy, flicking his cigarette into a retreating wave.
Gnats rose in a swirl from a pile of kelp as June stepped over the fish, having dismissed the thought that perhaps she ought to bury it. The sea would do the honors when it returned on its next attempt to cross the beach. June hoped one day the sea would drown the whole town. She fantasized swimming through underwater houses, the drowned floating over sofas, bumping into walls, while June rose through a chimney in a burst of bubbles and swam away with Jeremy.
It was cold and the wind was bitter, stinging of salt spray. Gulls dipped over something at the far end of the cave where a flash of gold cut through the cloud-shrouded light. June called Jeremy to come see what it was as she scurried over spray-slick rocks toward the wheeling gulls. When June turned to call again, Jeremy was gone.
Jeremy barely noticed June anymore. Those summer afternoons hiding under the boardwalk, poking sticks between the boards into the bare feet overhead, of swimming far past the buoys then collapsing on hot sand, skin to skin, faces to the sun, ended sometime June couldn’t quite pinpoint. It seemed Jeremy kept growing older, taller, while June stayed June.
I’m invisible to him too, she thought. The wind smacked her face and the sun licked the horizon like a thick pink tongue. The sea had shushed nearly still. Slate gray, big as forever, night and sea were waiting eagerly. June knew full well it was risky going back into the cave, the tide rushed in so fast even townsfolk who knew better had at times been swept away. But something bright still flickered—only take a minute.
Cold sand squelched between June’s bare toes as she rushed to the opening of the cave. Two gulls, beaks ajar, screamed over something. June kicked them away and in the last rosy glow of day, she inhaled such a surprised gulp of air it made her hiccup. The man’s eyeless sockets were round as half dollars, his opened mouth leaked something dark and viscous. The golden flash she’d seen were the brass buttons on a fancy captain’s jacket.
The tide circled June’s ankles as she studied the dead man. She imagined tiny silver fish nibbling delicately at his tender eyeballs as the brass buttons glittered in the dying light. Jeremy wanted to join the navy. Wouldn’t he like a captain’s jacket? Oh, if she gave it to him, he’d see her again.
A wave retreated like a hand pulling aside a curtain. The man in the brass buttoned jacket was revealed as only a half captain, all below the belt was gone.
The sun dropped and night spilled. A whoosh of gull wings on the lip of the cave alerted June there were only moments to get out, each incoming wave slapped harder. The buttons on the captain’s coat no longer gleamed as she pulled it on, but the wet wool was so heavy it threatened to pull her down beside the dead man. June dropped the coat and splashed toward the entrance of the cave, the sea licking her knees.
She thought kelp had wound around her ankle. June fell, swallowing seawater. She fought to stand, gasping, coughing, as another wave shoved her back from the cave entrance. A strange blue glow now permeated the water. Stars of the sea, thought June, awed for a precious moment by the unworldly glowing shimmer. The light illuminated one end of a pale scarf wrapped around June’s leg. The other end of the scarf was tied around an underwater woman’s neck. She stared up at June through the foam, haloed by bioluminescent plankton, her dark hair glittered, a net of blue stars.
Another wave slammed into the cave, more furious than before. The underwater woman disappeared with the waves that pushed deeper into the cave. June didn’t realize her mouth was open until cold spray slapped her face. As if awakened from a dream, June realized the sea was to her waist.
She staggered onto the beach. The night was still. The wind had dropped. The bell clanged on the buoy in the harbor, and, shivering, June made her way to the boardwalk where her boots were waiting. The woman’s face floated in her mind as she passed the dock. She was cold, but not as cold as the woman in the cave. Who were they, these drowned dead?
Lights were twinkling in windows as June made her way home. Her wet hair smacked her cheeks and her sodden skirt clung to her legs like the drowned woman’s scarf. She ought to tell someone. A dead captain, a drowned woman.
Only a cat perched atop a milk truck watched June’s awkward progress down the street in too-big fisherman’s boots, leaving a sludgy trail of sea and sand behind.
* * *
It was one of those little old towns with a name too long in a language no one spoke anymore. It was too hot in summer, too cold in winter. The houses and shops facing the promenade once painted white, blue, and yellow, were peeling to gray wood beneath, barely still held together with rusted nails. In summer, tourists who couldn’t afford the picture postcard towns lugged blankets and picnic baskets onto the pebbled beach. At night they shyly extended a palm for the fortune teller or gaped at the two-headed calves, their teeth stuck together with saltwater taffy. They lined up to ride the carousel on a dolphin, a saddled sea horse, or inside a giant oyster shell, sitting in place of the pearl.
When summer was over, the town pulled down the window shades, moving behind them as inky shadows while the pennant flapped on the fortune teller’s striped tent and the wind blew shingles loose from roofs. A few men went out on the big fishing boats, some in dinghy’s, others slept by the fire, their sea days over. Women put up fruit and vegetables in preserves and jams, and the few children filed into the one room schoolhouse and church on Sundays.
The Modernaires were harmonizing the song, Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree—June recognized it because her brother had the record—on the radio as she dragged herself into the kitchen.
June started up the steep back stairs of the cottage when her mother said, “Looks sure we’ll get in the war now.” She was about to reply when June’s father said, “Roosevelt’s dragging us in, goddamn him.”
Her mother wasn’t talking to June. She hadn’t even noticed her.
Jeremy once told her that in the first war, half the British calvary on their way to France were drowned by German U-boats. Now there were bigger ships and bigger guns. June wept thinking of the poor horses. Jeremy couldn’t wait to join the navy.
At dinner June’s father talked over her brother and her mother. War should be fought on your own land or not at all. No, his son would not volunteer. Her mother pulled pin bones from the fish with her teeth and June ate bread dipped in soup, the broth as salty as the sea, thinking of the woman floating underwater in the cave. She almost told them about the half a captain, about the woman whose hair was a net of blue stars, but her father turned up the radio to drown out the sound of her mother’s wailing and her brother’s yelling. No one noticed when June got up from the table. She went to bed and lay there staring at the ceiling, watching moonlight diffused by the old wavy window glass try to creep into the corners.
* * *
Aunt Beguila told the woman at the shop no one thought June would live when she was born—she had hung between life and death for months. June remembered this, it had been like being in the bottom of a green pool where light and dark took shapes of fantastical design. Her mother said it was nonsense, she couldn’t possibly remember, she’d been a newborn infant.
God hadn’t designed her brain yet, said her father. She was empty until she was baptized. While her aunt talked to the woman with the thick face, June fingered a locket with a silver sand dollar charm. It was a display meant for tourists in a glass case with awkward mermaid figurines, matchstick pirate ships, and ashtrays made from clam shells. The glass case was dusty because no one in town bought these things. Though her aunt and the woman had discussed June’s birth before, how she had hung between life and death, which explained why June was June, they had moved on to a discussion of someone else’s misfortune when June pocketed the necklace with the sand dollar charm. Two minutes later, June’s aunt left the shop alone, having forgotten her niece. The shopkeeper was reading a magazine when June passed the counter. She briefly looked up when June opened the door, down again when she closed it behind her.
I am in between, thought June, ruminating on her birth story, which must be why she was becoming more invisible by the day. Why Jeremy barely saw her anymore. I am neither here nor there. June clasped the necklace around her neck, fingering the silver charm.
* * *
Inside the church the pews were straight backed and hard bottomed. June counted sixteen parishioners, their backs to her as she sat down beside her mother. Behind the pulpit was a great window of colored sea glass, bits and pieces of bottles smoothed and molded by sand and the beat of waves illustrating Jesus on tiptoes atop a glassy Sea of Galilee. But it was the smaller window in the side aisle that always captured June’s attention. In this window Saint Pelagia the Flayed was mid-air, tossed by tiny dark figures on a cliff into a raging sea glass ocean. The saint’s long black hair flew behind her, contrasting with her shiny red skinned body. Her opened eyes looked at June, wide and bottle blue.
Saint Pelagia was the patron saint of the town. Once. This was before the town teetered on the edge of extinction. Unlike Pelagia the Virgin, or Pelagia the Harlot, this Saint Pelagia wasn’t listed in Butler’s Lives of the Saints. June’s brother said this Pelagia wasn’t even real, the whole story was made up. She had never saved sailors from the Romans, and Nero had not had her flayed and thrown her into the sea. Nowadays, only a couple of ancient sailors still wore a medal around their neck stamped with her skinned body, few in town remembered her at all.
The priest chanted, the choir chorused, a baby was baptized in sanctified saltwater, but all June could think about was the woman floating in the cave, lit eerily by the plankton June called sea stars. The drowned woman’s hair had been black as the saint’s, her sightless eyes glowed as blue. June’s heart fluttered and she felt as if she had swallowed the sun, so bright, so warm was the understanding spreading inside her. Although she knew it had been centuries since Saint Pelagia had been stripped of flesh and thrown into the sea by a Roman emperor, the number of years that made up a century didn’t concern her. Saints performed miracles. Why shouldn’t Pelagia be a miracle all by herself, flowing with the currents from ancient Greece to this cold rocky coast in saintly defiance of any human definition of time?
While the parishioners kneeled, heads down to pray, June slipped from beside her mother and crept down the side aisle. No one paid any attention as she walked swiftly toward the door. She fingered the sand dollar at her throat—surely a sign—the silver chain had slipped easily into her palm. Once outside, she filled her lungs with salted air, keeping herself from shouting her excitement.
The sun was shining bright, almost yellow enough to pretend warmth, although the puddles in the street were crusted with an icy film. There was no one about except the blind old man who’d once run the ferry. He hated God whether represented by Presbyterians, Baptists, or the erstwhile Pelagians, and spent his days drinking, urinating in public, and cursing.
“To Hell with you,” he shouted as June rushed past.
“I’ve found the saint!”
“Fuck saints,” replied the old man, spraying urine in the direction of June’s retreating footsteps.
June laughed aloud. The old man had seen her. Saints restored sight to the blind. June was almost holy now. Jeremy and June would eat cotton candy in the giant oyster shell, sitting side-by-side on the carousel. She smiled at the lying sun and the bottle glass blue sky.
* * *
In the bay, the sea was green gold. Sun dappled waves broke on the rocks in sparkling prisms. June was filled with the mixed excitement and dread of meeting a ghost. A martyred saint, dead for hundreds of years, would be twice as thrilling and three times as terrifying. But the cave was empty of anything except driftwood. No trace of the half captain, no sign of a drowned saint.
June splashed into the retreating sea up to her thighs, stirring the water with both hands until they were numb from cold. The only thing she found in the whirl she created was a small fish that swam dizzily away. June turned her face up to the winter sun. Why? she asked. The sun was silent, but a cloud slipped across it throwing a shadow over the bay.
Gulls cried. Behind June, the tattered pennant atop the fortune teller’s tent fluttered. From this point on the beach the town looked as small as it was, and inside June the hot joy of revelation began to melt. She felt wobbly standing in the surf, waves breaking cold around her knees. Her toes had gone numb, in her excitement she had forgotten to take off her shoes and now her legs felt so heavy, as if iron plates had been nailed to the soles of her feet.
The sun hid behind the pile of clouds blown in from the south, the bright day now eclipsed, the sea darkened and waves began to race. June felt something tickling her ankle and looked down at the long pale scarf.
The woman’s dress that floated around her form. One side of her torso was gone. The woman’s black hair rose and fell with the swelling sea. Eyes June had thought blue, glistened white, color stripped to the sclera, and her pink mouth was stretched wide in a grin or a scream.
June watched the scarf unwind from the woman’s neck and float away as the colorless eyes stared.
“Pray for me.”
June unclasped the seashell necklace and bent to the woman underwater, but when she tried to put it around the woman’s neck, the head detached like a snapped flower. Soft tissue flapped from the woman’s neck. For a moment June was shocked still. The head was sucked into the curl of a wave and disappeared. Gulls cried, and far away June heard the peal of church bells.
The sun broke free of the clouds in that way it sometimes does in a painting, a beam of light shines magically and makes the viewer believe, if only for a moment, in something divine.
June fell to her knees in the sea, the saltwater lapping her breasts, beside the corpse of the dead drowned woman, and gently tugged. The flesh slipped free far easier than the captain’s brass buttoned coat.
* * *
It was a dog that saw it first trudging heavily up the street, trailing a snotty line of sea and sand. A cat atop a barrel hissed and the dog barked and feinted, yet seemed afraid to come close enough to bite. In front of Jeremy’s house, a lopsided cottage, half its roof slates in a broken pile around an evergreen in the yard, it stopped and stood still.
It was the gulls that brought people out of their houses to see what the commotion was about. Hundreds of birds shrieked madly, whirling and darkening the sky, a foam of wings over the town’s roofs.
The thing standing in the street was surrounded by the buzzing of flies, awakened from winter torpor by the scent of a dead thing. Jeremy’s father came out of the house and immediately went back inside to get his shotgun. Jeremy’s mother screamed. A crowd gathered, circling, the dog growled and barked fiercer.
“What the hell,” said Jeremy, coming out of the cottage. “June?”
The thing dressed in decaying flesh turned to him, teeth bared in a smile and held out a hand from which skin slipped onto the pavement of the street.
“Race you out to the buoy?”
“Jesus Fucking Christ.”
June looked at them all. Townspeople, her mother and father, her brother.
“I’m here,” she said turning to them. “See? I’ve come.”
Not one dropped to their knees. Jeremy’s father shook his head and went back inside. The dog grew brave and nipped at the flesh at June’s shins, pulling at a sliver of dangling skin. Jeremy followed his father inside the cottage. The townspeople turned away. Only the gulls and flies followed June as she trudged back toward the sea, wondering if other saints floated in between, invisible.
End.
K. Wallace King’s recent short fiction appears in Chthonic Matter, Underland Arcana, Nightscript, Orca, and Aseptic and Faintly Sadistic, an Anthology of Hysteria Fiction, among others. She lives in Hollywood, California, where the handprints of dead dreamers are pressed into the sidewalks.