We Remember || ONC2022

My arms around the black horse's thick, arched neck and legs gripping just behind his powerful shoulders, we cut through the water. We explode out of a wave, my laughter bright, before diving again. Down, down, we are free. Friend, you are familiar to me, but who am I? This creature beneath the waves.

I woke during the gray hour. My dream was gone but for a vague sense of freedom and an itching need to get outside and move. The chill of the summer night still hung in the air, so I pulled a pair of many-times patched trousers over my shorts and buttoned up an old, too-big flannel that had once belonged to my father. I grabbed my knit cap and canvas jacket from their hook by the kitchen door. 

Auntie Pim and I had a day's worth of baking for tonight's Remembering, but there was time enough for a walk on our quiet stretch of beach. Pim wasn't a late sleeper, but I shut the door behind myself with a gentle hush in case she hadn't yet stirred, crossing through the mudroom to get outside.

Set on the weathered wood slats of our porch was a giant conch shell that I'd found on the beach as a child. It was a dear friend to me, having shared many of its secrets over the years. I pressed it to my ear, cold on my bed-warm skin, and waited for the whispering waves to tell me in which direction I should go today. To the left, it said, and I set off through the dunes and down the rocky shore.

The tide was high this morning, which wasn't ideal for beachcombing. Most treasures were revealed when the waters receded, so gathering for witch bottles or spells could wait another day. For now, I'd enjoy the exercise of a walk on the beach. The water was a little rougher than usual for the bay, the familiar shshsh of the waves punctuated by the clap of whitecaps breaking. A strong wind lifted the tips of my wispy, blond hair from where it rested on my shoulder blades.

I stopped cutting my hair about a year back and I liked it like this. Too long for a boy, my father would have said, but it had been many years since he and my mother left for the bigger trading towns in the north. I was seven when it became clear that, like Pim, I was gifted in the old ways and it was never really in question that my place was with her by the sea.

To take a sea witch away from the water was to cut them off from their magick. They would be a husk of themselves, an emptied shell. My parents had their excuses for why they left our little village and me behind, and though my life with Pim had been a happy one, happier than it would have been with my parents, their going had left a scar that, nearly eleven years later, still ached.

A spot of green stood out amongst the gray pebbles and I crouched down to pick it up. Smooth and wet between my fingers, the glass was the color of seafoam. I was reminded of a pair of eyes, the softest green and sparkling like the sun on the water, against a backdrop of warm, brown skin. Alder Flint, the boy who disappeared into the night. The boy we Remembered. As if any one of us could forget. One year gone.

I'd admired him, from afar, of course. As far as my seat at the back of our Year's classroom in our tiny schoolhouse, anyway. There was no question as to the value that Pim and I had to the residents of Saltash, but there was always a distance between us and the other villagers. They respected us, needed us—a pair of sea witches in a fishing village was invaluable. And yet a thread of fear ran through our interactions.

Still, my eyes never failed to catch on Alder's bright grin. He had a smile and a laugh for anyone, sometimes even me. He'd seemed to be friends with everyone, and I wondered if he'd share some of his charm with me—if only I'd had the courage to approach him with a smile and a word of my own.

But then he was gone. Slipped into the night. No word. An empty chair in the schoolroom. Dead eyes on his parents' faces. No laughter in the air, for a time anyway. I curled my fingers around the soft green sea glass, warming it in my palm. Not wanting to hear a no, I didn't ask the Goddess permission to remove this treasure from the beach before slipping it into my shirt pocket. I had no right to this piece of Alder Flint's eyes. We were nothing to each other, really, nothing but two people who shared a home in Saltash. But still I Remembered.