I stood on the beach today and knew I was going there forever.
My mother tells me that the water is like a breathing darkness. She says things like this to scare my sisters and me, to keep us away from the beach, but I still go down there and talk to the fish, and they talk to me. The fish tell me things in their own secret language, the language of the water, and I understand them like I understand the language of my mother and sisters. The fish tell me that there are others who look like me, who look like them, who are waiting for me to join them.
I see memories of wooden ships, their bone white sails puffed out like a man's chest, the flailing of arms and legs creating a chaos of bubbles and water. Sometimes a boot washes up on the beach, or a pair of shredded breeches or cloth shirt, and I bury them near the house. I see the ships when these things wash up on the beach. But they are not my memories.
Mother says that the water takes more lives than God could ever realize. She says that when she dies, she wants to have a water burial, to be buried underneath the mucky sand with the rocky cliffs as a tombstone. She was born in the water, and she wants to die there after her time on two legs.
I want to die and go to the water. I don't know why I want to, but when my mother speaks of the ocean, I can hear this longing in her voice. It's almost like a song. My sisters don't hear it, but I know my mother used to live down there, used to sing the songs of the sea to sustain her life and her kind. I hear these songs sometimes, even though no one sings them. She could have lived forever, she said. But now, now she merely walks and talks and takes a mortal's responsibility for the house that her and her mate had built.
I never knew my father. My sisters did, because I was the last one, and before I could remember my mother had stopped bleeding and now she owns this big wooden house, painted like the sky, with five daughters. I've heard them whisper before they go to sleep at night that he was a sailor that she rescued from a wreck and was buigiled by him, and she took him as a mate and chose the life of motherhood and inevitable death. When he had given her children and her blood ceased to flow, she took him down to the beach and gave him a sea burial, that she cut off his head and his loins and ate of the meat, leaving the rest of it for the fish in the darkness. He was no longer needed now that she had five daughters and they could live off the sea's gifts.
My mother keeps his skull in a little square aquarium in her room, on the windowsill. Sometimes, when I knew that everyone was gone, I'd go up there and stare at the greenish prism of the glass, how the light made the room look as if you were staring up through the water at the sky, and I'd wonder what his face would've been like. My mother says I look a lot like him. I don't go up there anymore because there's nothing to remember now. All I remember is the sea, the ships, the helpless men who are carried down to the sea bed and become sustenance. I taste the blood in my mouth when I hear the waves crash on the rocks.
Now that I've started to bleed, my mother tells me she knows that the sea calls me. She told my sisters when they started bleeding, and they stay away because they believe in the breathing darkness. But I don't believe. I want to feel the sea inside me. Tonight, I'll go to the beach, and return to the water where I will sing my song of the sea, and be where I know I belong. And when my mother dies, I will sing her song, too.