Fisherman's Wife

         She had come to this place, this meeting of the sea and land, the place where her husband should return but hadn’t. The promise he made her give, the night of his first departure just days after their marriage was to come here no more than ten times, to give him over to the sea should he not return by then, and continue on with who she was without him.

         Now she sat, in the sand, the chill water gently lapping longer and longer against the goose flesh of her legs, gently caressing her like he had, but with that dead lack of warmth. The winter sea was not him, but he had become it. His touch now chill, as it was destined to be, or so his god has deemed, and she let the chill take her.

         Her light shift was little protection from the early winter’s breeze, or the cold of the caress he had become. Their long promised life, their fanciful dwellings of older age and children with their own swaddlings, all lost in pursuit of the teeming fish and bounty of their young home. The woman knew his passion and families profession when she met him, but it never failed to still her breath as she watched the skiffs move gently over the horizon, the men of the sea tossing this net and that, rowing further and further away.

         She could not blame him for what he was, or the sea for which he had become. She turned the guilt toward herself in an attempt at a punishing redemption for her loss. She could have held him that day, could have prevented his going, but like many time before, she held her heart and her tongue, and watched breathlessly as he dwindled and succumb to the edge of the horizon and sea.

         The sea brought itself in a twinkling rush, the pulled away teasingly in a cold hiss. The water was rising bit by bit, each meeting of her and he a bit more consuming, a bit more chill.

         Months before this day, he had left himself inside her, had spurred the growth of their first of many dreams and started them both towards those fanciful daydreams of lives spent together. Now he was gone, and she was expected to continue, alone.

         His chill embrace moved further this time, running past her back, forcing the sand to give slightly under her, sucking her downward. It was if he were rushing her to join him, impatient for their reunion. The chill was becoming familiar, and if she could just stand it long enough, she would embrace him as well, as he her, in the same icy rush and release. Soon there would be a rhythmic mixing of one with the other, an inseparable pairing off their two souls. Comfort found in the darkness and unending cold of the sea.

         The other wives and mothers, the other father and sons of those still not returned, no longer came. They knew or had come to know that there would be no return this time. They were capable of releasing their loved ones in so few days to the obvious truths of where they had gone. This girl could not be so faithless.

         She would allow the sea to take her in the way seas will, and bring her to know her husband again. There, they would share together the lost dreams, but not the loss of one another. Together they could mourn the chances missed, the dreams now dead in them.

         He came again, this time rushing so forcefully he splashed across her midriff, leaving crisp stinging touches across her face and neck. Her hands sunk deeper in the sand, her elbows almost buckling as her breath sprinted in and out at the suddenness of his chilling touch. Her stomach rolled in harsh reaction to the reality of his brisk and jarring embrace.

         The girl’s mother was long dead, and her own father gone just this year. She was alone, lost and frightened of the world around her, and her future before today had become a lightless veil of darkness. Without him, she could not continue, without him she was incapable of the love she so longed. But soon the darkness would not be her fear, but her everlasting home, with him a master of the sea, an inseparable part of her. Her stomach lurched again, and then pushed hard against her lower back.

         It was his gift, their dream, fighting against the cold around him. The love he left in her had begun to move, and it drove her to weep openly at the next rush of the sea. Her decision was made; she could not go through life without him, not with his child. The unborn stretched and lurched again as its father rush upward along her chest. The time was near, and soon she would allow herself pulled to her husband, and it would not be undone.

         The first appeared before her, a skiff, returning to the shore where it had left, empty and unguided, but drifting silently toward her with the incoming tide. She brought her hand up from the sand where it had become buried, and brushed at her face, leaving a cold saltiness. There was the boat he had left in, the boat that did not return with him. It came to her and slowed, as if guided by some thing she could not know. The seas gentle surface held it to her, like an angel offering a hand to one fallen.

         Her weeping came in earnest, her breath ragged and shaking as she pulled herself into his skiff. She could see others now, empty vessels promising no return of their human cargo, but returning nonetheless to be beached where they left ten days before.

         This was his plea, his raging against the lonely darkness to save that which he loved, that which he would love and seen grown. The child was not hers to take, nor was her own life, but her unending memorial to whom her husband was, and who he would never be.

         She lay in the bottom of the skiff, crying and shivering, hugging his gift with both arms, taking in the familiar smell of him long after the boat was held tight by the shores sands as the tide receded, and the sun released the day to darkness.

Word Count: 1071