When We Came From The Sea: A Short Story
When We Came From The Sea:
A Tale Of The Italian Seaside
Il sole rises slowly in the tangerine hue of the empyrean firstlight. The juice of valencia veins dragging up the rims of lush viridescent mountains, forestlands of Apennine wolves and Corsican hares burrowing into the moss-grown underbrush. These hills rest in our archaic bones, borne of the land before time. Molded by the calluses and marrow elbows of gone saints, countenance covered by a delicate milk veil. They were us, once. Scraping against our cerulean harbor, seeping below our ghostly wake.
The outskirts of Naples is our birth. Years of dipping feet into azure soft waves, chasing innocence down amber shorelines. Sat atop fractured cerise bricks of our history, pulling oiled olive-toned knees to small jawbones. To abandon this fishing town was foreign, harshly curved syllables on alien tongue. Here we are our own mythology. Threading folktales of midnight seas and divine lands inside the bursting infernos of constellations. We belong to no God, no man in a city’s leather seats. Here the tidings of Neptune command us, bending our silver swords to the Mediterranean.
Stella knew of her own man made heavens. Sewing together the stitches of where she thought life lacked, mending her fantastical desires by her mother’s teeth-bared teachings. She painted a navy goddess across her skin, one she could serve during the first bruised lilac of twilight when she knelt down to pray. Against umber bedframes forged by her grandfather’s hand, when the salt-tainted wind of the sable sea kissed her skin gently as if a mother’s beckoning call. A spiral evening gown of roaring waves, lapping against stone streets as it trailed behind her chest. Thick stygian curls alike Stella’s own clinging to broad shoulders, a straight roman nose carried through her bloodline. A projection of her features she thought to be so beautiful, the epitome of a woman’s divinity to live in herself. She always believed her elder sister’s words to be true, women were the creators – therefore we are all goddesses, in our own ethereal right.
She woke as il sole breathed his ignited breath into the carmine heavens. The sky alight in a wondrous illusion, yellow-legged gulls swooping across her windowpane. She crept slowly, fleece covers pulled to her collarbones. “Mamma,” she whispers into the breeze of the morning, crawling into a hand-stitched seat cover. Blinking her gaze around the kitchen, bronze spirals sketched across flaxen clay walls like seashells decorating a cultural palace. Wooden carved architecture of a generation’s forthcoming, Stella’s great-grandmother humming hymns of long-past ages. Only she stood, remaining against the coal-lit oven. The thick, sour-smelling smoke filtered out through the chimney, dissipating into the slow silence only interrupted by the crackling of flame.
Mamma Atena often spoke of the legends she had created. Forged of the ichor stored in soil of luxuriant plains, stretching miles across this rich peninsula. Stories of princesses carving their own fates, elven creatures traveling the barriers of our world. Simple distractions, she once proclaimed. For she had greater misgivings, harrowing troubles. Wars staining our once russet cliffsides a nauseating shade of violent red, the tendons of guiltless servants to this land forgotten by arrowheads of bows. Here, against the planks of this harbor, no terror could reach them. Secluded and silent as we strung together our own alluring melodic hymns, isolated inside the highland walls. Stella never thought of this landscape as entrapment, rather protection. They were the devotees of Amphitrite. The siren songs awaited their passage outside, they were expected.
“Tell me of the stories,” Stella would plead by the slow death of firelight. Auburn heat breathing its surreal warmth on forearms, cross-legged on a vermilion weaved persian rug. Fantasies of spiral staircases and amaranthine eternal blackness amongst a full-stomach. A pale knight of earnest care, eager to dance and swoop her away to a marvelous silver castle in the clouds above everything she held in warmth. “Tell me of the moon, tell me of the unicorns, tell me of the goddesses, tell me of the power.” She’d chant under her breath as if an incantation. An enchantment laced with the bittersweet vines of her young voice and all it could want, childlike enough to taste imagination as drops of gone god’s ichor on her tongue. Enough to bask in this innocence and expect it to last her a lifetime of wishing, as she was not yet allowed to taste the delts of circumstance by her mother’s demand in her sea-sick prayers.
Pressing soles of frigid feet to deep dewy plains, she hollers what awaits her as she flees like a rabbit in flight. “I will fetch the water, do not wait-up.” She is bolting down dirtied stone pathways before her voice can reach anyone’s ears, twirling in her thinly self-knitted linens. Il sole a vibrant ever-seeing flame, awaking her world with the flick of his wrist. She envisions taking the sun itself in her hands and biting in, syrupy tangerine innards running down her jawbone with elegance. Alike in her grandmother’s fields of amethyst candied figs, the wind combing an aureate brush through her tangled curls of mousy-brunette.
The cushioned soles of her feet stung against the coarse gravel, a gentle humming hymn escaping her parted lips. She danced with a disregard to the grit cutting into her lightened skin, imagining an audience swooning over the lonesome ballerina. Her mother was once a dancer, birdhearted and soaring. Late past midnight Stella would find the woman mourning her grieving grace, as it was laid to rest when she spread her legs to allow the child to take her first breath. This remembrance was not one easily dreamt away.
She gripped the side of the well with frail bones, peering over the edge with a curiosity never to be satisfied. Mamma lectured her endlessly about the foreseen and inevitable danger of the unknown. The void laid before her was an encapsulation of everything she wondered of, but would never find. The scorching metal bucket swayed in the obnoxious breeze, as if the wind was scolding her too. The basket submerged below the clear blue and came up gasping with an ease, a meticulous task Stella was fond of. She was always one to pay attention.
She let her gaze stray, her breath coming heavy in the midsummer berating heat. Wiping the tricklings of sweat from her browline and refocusing her soaking wrists, her eyes began to ache as she gaped down into the depth. Swirling indigo water, rising to meet her elbows. She yelps and draws back, startled hammering in her ribcage. The waves seemed to grow disturbed, furious as they rocked against the rough cobble face. As if pounding for release, they rocked like meaning to sink the greatest of vessels to the widest sea’s sands.
The girl watched with curious horror, slowly leaning over to find the source of the turmoil. When she could identify nothing, the water began to stifle its cries. Stilling to a silent lurching then an empty calmness, Stella was left pondering. The fierceness of midday still beating down on her neck, she regains her wits and takes off. The sopping bucket clutched to her chest, the lace of her gown stained dark against the unmended path. Her feet beat the ground, blinking the wet from her midnight eyelashes.
The night fell with a swiftness. The fireflies flickering their theatrical romance by an open pane, the yipping hares burrowing into their mother’s gentle fur as the marble fox forsakes its perilous hunt. When the wind of the darkness came right, Stella could taste the sea salt. It stinginess biting into her tongue, like the release of breath. She slipped under the wool duvet, the calm bleating of the sheep soothing her ears. Mamma sewed the blanket together by her own will, the hours after she found out she was with child. Pappa said her hands did not stop mending for ten days. She would soon find the stubborn Stella would be born on the tenth day of the tenth month, with her fragile throat opened in screaming and her tiny fists clenched. Now she laid before the warmth of her mother’s hardship, ten years later. She rubbed the hem of the bedcover between the crevice of her pinky and ring finger.
Neither did speak, for there was nothing to be said. Stella left with her lips parted, stunned by the face of all that is beautiful. She reaches out to touch the figure’s skin, yet she could only feel nothingness under her fingertips. The way of imagination, only becoming real when you cannot stay. Left breathless, Stella sinks back into the consuming black of the void. She did not bid farewell, the woman could feel her resistance to parting. It’s almost she was commanding it.
She jolts awake, her linen nightgown soaked to her starved torso. Gazing into the blind darkness of the attic room with timbered ceiling frames lingering over her, a presence could be felt. Not watching with maliciousness, rather a protective intent over her child frame. It was near the look of a mother. A ferocity unseen in the eyes of anything else but the embodiment of love. Stella rests a quivering wrist on a bony knee, soothing herself over the cartilage curve.
She attempted to drift back into the lull of unconsciousness, yet no sleep arrived on these restless shores. She was the sailor being dragged beneath the indigo. With a messily remarkable elegance, as if a rehearsed ballroom dancer – she darted through the narrow halls. Down the creaking stairs littered with a past time’s obsessions, frigid contrast hitting her naked soles with a sting. Out the door she ran barefeet, the sea whispering lullabies.
She grasped onto the thick branch of a vibrantly viridian olive tree, her pounding arteries beating the call of the ocean. She pressed her ear to the ink painting above, twinkling heavens humming. She listened. They told her of the illusion of men’s senseless fate and the faith it accompanies, where the waves waited for her feet to break their foam. Grand legends of who she once was. Long ago, when only her lovelorn soul roamed these stained valleys. When she had deserted her mortal form and her core laid foremost. She was not a tooth-gapped girl then, but a goddess of time.
When she beat the ground once more, a rhythm Mamma Atena would snap overtook her body. Stella climbed the tallest hill until she fell with aching muscles, fingertips dirtied dark from digging into the rabbit burrows. She was larger than the world here. Standing with the final remnants of determination, she could oversee her homeland. She could swallow the stars from here, feel their dull burning of white light down her sore throat. She saw her one home, a dot amongst many of those she all knew. A familiarity settled in her bones as with a kiss, she knew she could’ve been nowhere else tonight. Illuminated only by the creation of divine women.
A pale glow startled her. Materializing from the shorebank, sand in her atramentous braids. She knew the appearance well, the woman of the sea. Slung over the crescent moon, so slow she could feel the needle point slicing her thumb. Her roman nose inches away from Stella’s own, matching weaving resting on their shoulders. She wondered if the goddesses’ mother did hers too. She outstretches her fingers, tracing the woman’s sharp collarbone. A breathy giggle, the cerulean lace of the goddesses’ dress tickling her unshaved legs.
With a sudden movement, her palms rise to Stella’s cheeks. She grips the child with an urgency, wild irises intense upon her. There was a message to be delivered, one that washed over the daughter. “The sea awaits you.” She enunciates with a deliberateness, the gentleness of her breath surrounding her.
Stella blinks. A phrase her Mamma would echo coming into her mind with a disorienting suddenness. “The sea does not wait.” She repeats from the depths of her. Words told to her when the fishing boats returned dry, and the salt pruned her skin. The goddesses’ expression is unwavering, and grows no less intense or any more offended. She carries a melodic stillness, an undeniable divinity. She was the presence of an ancestral burial ground, a glass-stained church.
“She waits for those she birthed.” She mouths, brushing a stray curl from Stella’s forehead. The sea delivers, just as she takes. There is no end to this story, just as there is no beginning. The sea is a being. She breathes and craves just as a starved girl. There is no method to her, just as there is no silence. She is furious, just as she is alive. Find her in the silence between the crashing of waves and the final breaths of drowned sailors. She returns to those she yields. She belongs to the girls she is.
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