Written By: Alexandra Adelina Nita
Even long ago, when rivers could run backwards and brooks babbled in human tongues, beauty still meant nothing to the sea. If the winds blew in cold and sharp she would turn her mind to strangeness. Flinging aside her blue-green jewels, she would lay gray and brooding across the horizon. From her shrouds of fog anything could emerge.
On such a day a fisherman found a woman sprawled facedown on the sand with a shawl finer than the silk she was wrapped in.
Before the sweat on his brow could cool, the woman staggered to her knees expelling equal amounts of curses and brine. She turned eyes as clear as tide pools on him. Her gaze was suddenly more mortifying than the thought of having to carry her prone body to drier ground.
That night she sat in front of his hearth to dry her clothing, careful not to singe the shawl, shimmering first one color, then another. She could not tell him her name, the name of her kin or the place the sea seemed to have stolen her from.
She did not seem embarrassed to be alone with a man, strange, and so hospitable he had taken it upon himself to feel embarrassed for her. But as he watched the fire’s shadow obscuring her face, he suddenly realized that he was also alone with a stranger.
She asked him then from where he hailed, and he could not help but tell her. No, the ground beneath his feet was not his home. Home was a place where the sun shone down on unforgiving soil, hard enough to break any plow. Where he had left to chase rare schools of silver fish up the coast. Where his mother and sisters wove under grapevines, wondering when he would save enough wealth to return.
The sea seemed to have stolen not all her memories, for she wrapped her shawl tighter around herself and told him stories he had never heard before. Stories of sun-bright waters alive with things that swam and scuttled beneath the waves, always moving yet aimless, abundant yet alone.
She spoke of a net woven so cunningly that a fish would be scaled or skinned before it even realized it had been caught and she promised to weave one for him if she were allowed to stay.
The fisherman had long resigned himself to hearing the cries of gulls instead of human voices, but from that day on she lived with him. She wove while he took to the sea. Her nets were so artfully made that each day they became almost too heavy with fish to lift, even when hungry things with sharp teeth gnawed holes in it.
Each fortnight he made the long trek to sell his salted and pickled catches in the nearest town. She honed her biting wit with opinions on its people: which merchants were liable to cheat him, which suitors were unworthy of their beaus and which artisans would find renown. It pleased her to be so often right and to hear him laugh.
He did not expect her to fall ill so suddenly. He would have said that it came without warning, except for a brief, inscrutable look on her face one night as they moved against each other in the bed they came to share. A desire he could not name dulled her eyes as she ran her mouth along his neck—as if she was far away and he were still a stranger—before she pulled back with a shudder.
Some sickness took hold of her body and mind. She ran a burning fever and refused all food, her solid frame growing gaunt. Her hands curled into claws with a steel grip on her precious shawl as she rambled on about the deepest depths of the sea where no light touched, where monstrous sister-creatures killed and consumed each other.
The fisherman kept a constant vigil by her bed, trying to keep her comfortable and fearing that at any moment she would die. But soon enough his eyes grew heavy and betrayed him to sleep. When he awoke, her fever had miraculously broken.
He delayed going into town as long as he could, fearing it might return, but she grew only stronger and heartier. When he at last made the trip, he found windows covered, doors barred, and merchants few and far between. The only person he could find who would answer his questions was a gray-haired grandmother smoking a pipe grimly as she made charms of protection.
She told him that a terrible creature had been lying in wait in the harbor under the cover of night. When it grew hungry it would crawl from the waters and damn the doomed to their depths.
Seized with horror at the thought of the woman he had left behind falling prey to the creature, the fisherman had barely thanked her before he rushed home. As night fell and he drew closer, he saw a strange shape outlined by the moon on the shore and concealed himself behind a rock.
A monster with smooth scales that shimmered first one way then another shrugged off its skin, leaving there a woman holding a shawl.
The fisherman froze in his hiding place, waiting until she had slipped back into their home. He found her sleeping like the dead, the shawl under her pillow. He lay himself down gently next to her, his heart sinking.
The next time he went to town, he brought back white funeral clothes. He told the woman he had decided to return home, and if she desired to go with him, tradition dictated that they ought to become man and wife. She must dress herself all in white and, without carrying anything, cross the threshold of their home and close the door behind her. Dressed the same, he would open it to her.
She eyed her shawl but left it neatly folded on the bed as she strode out the door, head held high. The fisherman made to seize it as the door swung shut, but paused with hands hovering just above it. Could he really carry out his plan? He knew how bright its owner’s eyes were, how brilliant her tongue, how warm she was when she slept beside him. What kind of monster would he be to destroy her? How much was she to blame for her hunger? Could he let her go far from the place they stood on the promise that she would never give into it again?
He suddenly pictured a nearly-imperceptible shape just beneath the surface of the sea. It hurtled towards a distant shore where the youngest of his sisters played.
He flung the shawl into the fire.
The second it touched the greedy flames the sound of a thousand roaring waves crashed over him, fading away to the forlorn cries of gulls. Then, slowly, the fisherman opened the door of his home.
He found only the sea lying gray and brooding against the horizon.