Historical Setting: washing on rocks in an unknown time
Dear God, how long must I be of earth? How long must I cling to tattered memories of human sounds? Dull, aching, cold — I know this healing hurt too well. Thank you, God, for the healing and hope and strength for the hurt.
The tide comes rolled tight and unfurls onto the rocks, then draws back over the sea-edge lying flat on the water, a hushed shroud on the sea to wrap what is left of me to be torn and beaten with the next slam onto the rocks.
Thrust of tidewater now against the tower of rock – a heartbeat then breath as sea fills the hollows of hard earth with ocean stuff. Splayed, I am on these rocks, broken between the impervious and the translucence of turbulence.
***
Waking on a wall of stone now, a loosened pebble leaps by me bouncing down this rock wall on a mad frolic to the sea. Yet a bigger stone is set loose from above, now bouncing down, down sending one vibration after another through the solid rockface.
It’s a human foot that loosens these rocks. Someone is climbing down here from above. I nearly see him. I’m sure my eye doesn’t suit his collecting basket of sea things. He takes a look and hurries off.
***
In this waking a black bird swoops near, perhaps to pluck my staring eye from… from whatever else is left of me, living now, not carrion.
More rocks are rolling down all around me. Someone comes so cautiously as though I could possibly rise up as a roaring leviathan. I can’t rise up just now, nor can I even make a whimpering human sound.
I open my eye just as he is bending toward me — then a gasp and a curdling scream — the kind of howl of a man crying out in sleep with a bad dream. Loosened rocks now are leaping down the rock face driven by the full might of human terror, howling horrors in wordless baying, fading in the distance and gone.
***
Silence again belies the void. The quiet would be complete except for the lapping of sea moving with moon pull, higher and higher water rising up.
Incoming tide surrounds me again, this opulence of seawater is intruding on my vision of sky. The wave rolls are upside-down, and I am rolling in a rub of rocks at the tidal edge here deepening into another night in darkness.
(Continues tomorrow)
Lazarus Ink 