Firework Sand

When the sand puffs at my heels as if the shore itself is spitting at me, when the crystals catch the light in a tiny galaxy of stars, sometimes close enough to sting the skin, that’s firework sand.  The tsunami took his hearing, left blood trickling from his ears long after the water drew back, but I can hear them.  I can hear the deathly cracks.
+++There’s a seagull wreathed in seaweed, green fronds fondling it in the shallows, and I must get it, I must, if we are to eat tonight.  Sometimes cows wash up, bloated with the stinking sighs only the dead can hear.  Once there was a giant squid, melting pearl and smelling of toilet cleaner, delivered by the waves.  They took it back again, and the cows.  We don’t eat those, nor the pets or the bodies, but the fresh corpses, the new dead, we do.  We have to.  We must.
+++Kyle’s so thin his fingernails look as though they’ve come from bigger fingers, maybe dad’s.  But I don’t want to think about him, just now.  Sneak… sneak… a suicide sneak, past the rocks and the barnacles and the fallen trees, over ropes and nets and bottles and buoys, under the beams and rafters of a roof wedged tight with exhaustion with boulders for walls.  Is there anybody there?  Are they watching?  Are they peering through small circles of sights, taking aim, ready to fire?
+++They blame us.
+++He’s five and I’m ten and they blame us.
+++It’s not long dead, caught in some netting, drowned I think.  When I lift its sopping weight from the waves, the netting comes too, and there’s a lot of it.  It’s heavy, too heavy, and I can’t break the mesh, daren’t use my teeth.  Instead I pull, turning to go, ready to dart left and right, port and starboard, up and down, to dodge the bullet and their blame.
+++If I’m lucky, if we’re lucky, there’ll be fish caught too, fresh ones with plenty of meat on them.  I try not to think what they’ve been feasting on, somebody said we are all made of stars but as far as I can tell, we’re all made of things eating other things, dead things, not just plants but names and faces.  Maybe my pinky finger has a bit of Elvis somewhere, maybe my kidneys a little Cleopatra.  Perhaps my nose was once a dolphin, my skin a dinosaur’s tail.  Mum and dad are probably whales right now; fish first, then whales, then something else, something wonderful and strong.
+++It’s really dragging on the sand and I can’t help but glance at the mountainside trees, at the deep dark green with the villagers within.  Maybe there’s no-one here today, maybe I’d be okay to wander and walk, to traipse and dawdle, write my name in the sand and sunbathe.  More likely they want a clean shot, or for me to be higher up the shore, or west a bit, or standing, or sitting, or whatever the heck it is they think a ten year old girl, a tourist for goodness sake, should be doing as penance for their loss.
+++It’s really heavy.  I’m moving as fast and as secretly as possible, but the net’s dragging on the sand.  If it’s got bodies, I’ll leave it by the cave; the tide can do with it as it will, but if it’s fish or things, good things, interesting things, helpful things, then by golly we’ll sleep well tonight.  Once there was somebody’s suitcase on the shore, all packed and ready to go, maybe from the hotel by the harbour, no, that used to be by what was the harbour.  We’re still using the toothbrush and smearing the paste, like our folks taught us, like we did at home.  Kyle sleeps in it at night; it’s big enough, just.  Curls up in a ball in a nest of old lady clothes, pinks and purples cosy in the darkness.  I have a bed next to him of sand and seaweed that I clear daily, high up in the system of caves.  It doesn’t even smell bad anymore, not since I got rid of the stink.  The stream trickling inside, rainwater from the island above, used to make me want to pee a lot, but now I barely notice it.
+++I want to look, oh boy do I want to, but I have to keep my eyes on the trees, watch out for a glint or a movement that means the sand will be spurting today.  Kyle’s at the entrance, I can feel him watching me, thumb in mouth, waiting for my safe return.  He knows better than to call out, knows better than to come out onto the pale sugar sand; we used to be three.
+++Then they shot Lorna, and that was that.  We were two.
+++Perhaps another two hundred yards to go.  I’ll need to avoid the outcrop and the wreckage, else the net might snag.  It’s heavy and I feel too exposed but now I’m on the drier sand it’s not so slow.
+++Their superstitions work in our favour too.  Not enough to make up for the shooting, the murder and the fear for our lives, but enough for us to find refuge in their sacred caves and not be hunted there, too.  We found gold and a skeleton, an old one with busted legs.  Kyle was thrilled, swaggering about pretending to be a pirate, ‘aarr’-ing and playing with thick heavy coins.  I was better pleased with the knife by its side, something to carve our meals with and protect us against those who would do us wrong.  Kyle keeps it whenever I go.
+++Nearly there.  A bit of sick, maybe only a spoonful though it feels like more, is burning at the back of my throat and I really really want to scream.
+++In, I throw myself in, and roll with Kyle on the sand, fizzing with the relief of being ‘home’.  The net can wait, now.  We’ve made it, we’re here.
+++Kyle helps me haul it in, he’s strong for five, strong for starving, and I’m pleased.  We climb up the rocky stairs within, rubble really but stepped just so.  He’s left the knife by the entrance and I let him keep pulling the net up as he stumbles towards the sky hole and the light when I too stumble.  I see what he’s dragging in.
+++She’s beautiful, shivering and shiny, twinkling with her own tiny lights.  Older than me, I think, but sheathed in the twisting twining mesh it’s hard to tell.  Her skin is the pale green of a bark-stripped sapling, her hair blacker than tar, and the lower half of her body is the rainbow’d silver of salmon.  Plucking the knife from the sand by our entry hole, I run up the rugged steps to my brother and motion him to stop.  He smiles, and I kiss his nose and pat his bum so he’ll sit down, then scamper back down to our catch.
+++Could we eat her?  She’d keep us going for weeks if I lay strips in the sunshine under the sky holes, drying fillets for jerky later.  Was she more fish or more human, or neither… was she even edible?
+++If I was going to do it, I should do it now while she was out of it, unaware, unfeeling, defenceless.  Where?  Would her neck be best, her chest – I couldn’t help but notice it was fuller than my mother’s – or was it different with them?
+++No belly button.  No fingernails.  I didn’t need to know how she poo’d.
+++Cutting the net instead, the plastic tough, its fibres splaying, I remembered how I used to pull the red netting apart with just my fingers when dad brought a bag of satsumas home from the market where he worked.  Fruit… my mouth watered and I looked at the rounded green of her, swallowing, wondering.
+++She sat up and I could see the ocean in her eyes, smell the sweet salt of her breath, hear the rushing of the waves outside as they came to claim her.  Froth swirled round her in a tickle of bubbles, pulling her beauty away, and her smile was the pinky pearl sheen of an empty shell.  Salt water rushed down my face, another loss, the entrance emptying again and I stood to go to my brother, feet sinking into sand.
+++Then another wave, a gush of bounty.  The cave filling as never before.
+++And I knew we wouldn’t go hungry again.

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Gill Hoffs lives in Warrington, England with her husband and son though her mind wanders all over the place. Her work has won several competitions and is widely available online, and in print at Who Else is Getting Stripped, Duality 4, Unbound Press Loose Leaves, SIR Volume 1, and several upcoming magazines – see her facebook account for details. Currently researching a non-fiction book about daring rescues in Scottish waters, she’d love to hear your [true] tales. Find her on facebook [mentioning Spilling Ink Review] or email her at: scottishredridinghood@hotmail.com.