Inside the tumbledown tavern, the young man from the north with the black beard sits beside the grey-bearded men like a raven among toothless old wolves. Lanterns gleam weakly. Tobacco and salt and fish mix with the tang of whisky. Quick glances are all they spare him until one of them speaks.
“New to these parts?” He doesn’t look his way.
“Aye,” says the young man.
Then the old fisherman looks for a moment and nods at the scars and scrapes on the younger man’s knuckles.
“See you work with yer hands.”
“I do at that. Make stubborn things do what they durstn’t.”
The greybeard clears his throat. “Mite isolated out here.”
“I prefer things that way.”
“Mayhap a poet too?”
“I didn’t mean for me.”
A few of them grimace as if they’ve tried to smile but can’t quite.
***
She walks outside as night falls in a cadence to match her heart. The ocean is silent, the Milky Way a scarf of glitter.
He will be home soon, having wooed the locals, laid traps for any thoughts of escape.
Behind the cottage, the early winter fields, dun and featureless under the stars, seem like a place loneliness might go to meet its own ghost and succumb.
Then, as always, his brisk footsteps along the path. Her nails making moon shapes in her palms. The airless, cheerless land without breath.
Someone has robbed even the gulls of their voices.
***
After he hits her the last time, harder than usual and partnered by a flash of savage joy, she waits for his storm to abate then leaves the cottage and walks to the clifftop and watches the slow grey heave of the sea. It looks brutish, forsaken, near dead. She keeps her gaze distant, not on her feet but on the damn-fool horizon, a thin downturned line of woe, so she cannot tell how close she is to the edge.
Perhaps she will see a mast. Find a brittle message curled in an ancient bottle. Or someone on the rocks below might hail her. Marvels. Phantasms. Delusions.
Her hitching breath louder than the surf, her stymied heart a church bell in a blighted land, pealing unheard.
We will never know if her next step finds land or falls hopeless through tenuous air. All we know is she is there and she is alone and we’ve left this story now.
__________
Image © Thomas Holmes