Spilled Milk

The air reeks of the sea. I shiver as the wind’s gnarled fingers creep under my skin and latch onto my bones, imbuing the wool cardigan around my shoulders with the scent I so closely relate to grief. I pull the sweater closer around me and bow my head into the wind, my hair snarling at the nape of my neck like a bird’s nest, my eyes streaming with waterfalls that cascade down my cheeks. The sand sucks at my bare feet, threatening to pull me down, as though she reaches up from the depths, begging to sing me one last song.

The summer sun smiled down on my mother as she danced on the sand, her yellow linen skirt floating around her pale white legs, her hair a matrimonial veil for life itself. She was radiance and beauty, competing only with the shimmering swells behind her. The waves kissed her feet, white like spilled milk but without the outrage. My mother danced on the sand as though she had been beauty itself, her moods as tumultuous as the tide; her dilated pupils beckoned me in, only to swallow me whole when her tide receded.

I shrug the cardigan from my tiny body, the wool prickling my skin as the fabric slips over my arms. I set it on the sand with the reverence of a dead fish. The waves pull on it once, twice, three times until the mass gives in and is tugged out to sea, disappearing into kelp and seaweed, where it will drag against the ocean floor until all that’s left are a few threads curled around cadaverous coral. I stand unmoving, an hourglass of sand, and as the night sky fades away, so do the bruises on my wrists and the whispered lullabies carried on the wind…

hush, hush, hush.