The Girl from the Sea

Chapter 2: Thus, the first lesson the girl learned was death

The girl had nightmares for a week.

She had never before been afraid of the night, never before been afraid of sleeping.

Or at least, never that she could remember in the morning.

Now, she dreaded closing her eyes and surrendering to the dreams which tossed her from scene to disjointed scene, buffeting her with waves of incoherent settings and voices, like the ocean during the storm. She stayed out, later and later, wandering the stretch of beach where she had been found. Sometimes she cried. Sometimes she screamed.

Sometimes she just sat. Silent, staring out across the waves as if they held anything for her except saltwater and brine.

Several mornings she woke with the ocean lapping gently at her feet, tugging at her clothes, and for a moment, she could pretend the water was a hand, and that the hand belonged to a human, and that the human belonged to her.

It wasn't hard to pretend.

She still caught echoes of his voice in the wind, and glimpses of the ghost of his presence in the corner of her eye. They taunted her, as if by listening just a little bit harder, or looking at exactly the right spot at exactly the right instant, she might bring him back.

So she didn't look. Didn't listen. She pressed her shoulder to her ear and stared straight ahead as the ache swelled in her throat and her chin trembled without her consent.

And despite the nightmares, despite the plague his death had cast upon her dreams, sleep was almost preferable. The real nightmare lay in waking up to the truth.

Eaxander, the only person in her memory whom she had loved, was gone.

By the seventh day, her stomach had long since passed from rumbling, stabbing pains of hunger, and slipped instead into a dull, acquiescent ache. She had eaten, had forced herself to, but sporadically and not enough.

Now she woke, and weakly, like the last protest of someone long used to being ignored, her stomach growled. The girl turned her eyes to the storm clouds gathering overhead, stood, and slowly made her way back to the cottage.

Every step along the familiar path felt like she was carving it anew with the trailing heaviness weighing down her ankles. Her mind was as empty as her stomach, as if every thought and feeling had swirled down some whirlpool drain, drying like tears into sticky residue on the walls of her mind. Down, down, down they had seeped, and now they pooled in her joints, filling her limbs with portulaca petals and static fuzz.

In comparison, it was almost laughably easy to open the door. The barest grasp of her fingers and twist of her wrist made the door swing wide, hitting the wall behind it with a bang.

The girl flinched; she had forgotten to catch it.

Forgotten how similar the bang of wood against wood sounded to the cracking of a staff.

Everything looked the same as it had when she had last left, like the dependable backdrop of a dream. Too familiar, too safe. Luring one in with the promise of comfort and familiarity before inevitably loosing the devastating blow.

Eaxander was gone.

There it was. She knew that. She had known that, but... forgotten, perhaps.

Not all the way forgotten, just buried it in the back of her mind-

Buried.

Eaxander would be buried.

The unwelcome thoughts, once given an inch took a mile, and she was helpless against the raging current of her own mind.