By Amy Akiko
Our semidetached bricks have never felt the eroding pain of the ocean. Safely anchored on dry land. We yearn from different sides of the same car-lined pier, an unfair border painted down its centre, no 15-year-olds, (who want to be in love), may cross over, it warns, as if our parents have drawn it with their own hands.
Escaping through bedroom windows, which feel like lifeboats, which have stared, like eyes, since we were knee-high, when you leapt from the boxy 90s Volvo, shoving your younger brother in the back, laughing as he tumbled to the shaved, yellow grass.
The rushed crunch of our adolescent footsteps, undeterred by night’s chill, the earth spinning away from its star. Furling our purpled fingers around moonlit lapels. The blankets of our giggling breath warming our iced pipe bones, as our parents sleep, and we try to forget the strict lines and curves of their separating words.
Cradling pieces of polished, jagged shore in our frozen palms, flinging it into the darkness, which sloshes before us, like a dangerous, unknown eternity. The further we throw, the closer our bodies feel, seeing how far away these nearby things can be propelled with such ease, at such speed, and here we are, still moored together, despite their, maybe when you’re 17 vagueness, which almost broke our hearts, as though we had forgotten that we were already loved.
We only stop, briefly, when we notice her there. A middle-aged woman, camouflaged against the waves, in almost equal darkness. We watch her face begin to smile, as if she is remembering a different world. Eyes cracking into tall stacks of wood at their outer rims, the sunken, eye-lashed pits alighting with the matches of hope, of a burning desperation, and the memory of dry walls she wishes she could return to, but not alone, and the scent of Sundays, and her daughter’s 2nd birthday party when everyone was last together and cake was eaten without her eyes creating smaller, deeper oceans than the one that has tried to steal from her.
“It’s not what you think,” she yells over, turning away from the violent water, which has given, but has taken nearly everything. “You don’t need to save me,” and we allow ourselves to believe her, letting the frothing mouth of waves swallow her down further. Their hungry bites against her meadowed dress, from another life. Against her raisin flesh, that was smooth when she last held the child she had birthed seven trips around the sun before.
“I’m guiding her home,” she says, turning back towards her past, hoping there’s a chance it can be her future, even now. “One day, if I―” and her words are rolled away by the water’s clashing song.
We pause, for a heartbeat, before plucking another pebble away from its mother stone, its brothers and its sisters, watching it drown, unable to contain our intertwined laughter, basking in each other’s condensed puffs, only seeing the face we’ve been forced to miss.
We barely notice as the whole of her body turns to flames, above and beneath the waves, brighter than any sun; continuing to lob our stones, as she burns for a past life we’re so eager to toss away into the ocean.
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Amy is an educator, artist and writer from South London. Her writing often focuses on the joy of love and the agony of love lost. Her short stories and poetry have appeared in East of the Web, The Tiger Moth Review, Cosmic Daffodil’s ebook ‘Natura’, Short Beasts, Litbreak, Isele Magazine and elsewhere.