Burials at Sea
Burials at Sea
The open water is no place for a disillusioned woman; let alone a girl.
“It’s the color of it,” says the fisherman, casting his net into the foam. “At night, it turns black. Bad omen waiting to happen.”
Except omens don’t ‘happen’, not in the way wishes are plotted or curses are spun. An omen is a well-crafted thing, and in my case, perfectly in line with the ascendancy of a baleful planet in a thirteenth house. I would not go into specifics.
“Three funerals I’ve been to,” the fisherman continues. “Sisters they were. On the headstones, the same month of birth. Then the same inscribed of their death, right beneath the birth dates.”
He makes the auspicious sign; such beliefs lingered around the coastline.
“Were they triplets?” I ask.
“Oh no. Different years they were born in. One after the other, all in the harvest months. They considered those good omens then.”
I knew why, but I let him repeat it verbatim: “Three good daughters for three good harvests. Three good harvests for three good homes. Three good homes for three full hearths. And these full hearths for these good daughters.”
They had such things memorized like dog whistles here; fit songs for simple lives. The fisherman was the lone captain of his vessel; hence, the mere presence of a woman onboard had ceased to be an awkward notion, without a crew to jeer and threaten the potential Jonah. Hence, I persist in my questioning: “But these weren’t good omens after all.”
It was not quite a question if one already knew the answer. The trick was in the telling and the hearing of it, like all great and terrible stories.
“Not at all, it turned out,” he continues. “The undersea saw to that. It’s the pull of it. All that blackness at the bottom, it casts a spell. As some people say.”
The last line is to absolve himself; he is only the teller of the tragic tale, not its crafter.
“Isn’t it easy to drown?” I ask.
“Only if you try hard enough.” He pulls in the net, yards of obsidian thread glittering with the treasure leftover from a scavenged realm: a few unfortunate cuttlefish and jellyfish. If he were luckier, there’d be crabs, the seasonally rare kind that fetch steeper prices on the market. “Only if you make enough fuss over it. The sea takes you then. Shuts you up with a mouthful of salt-water if you quibble too much.”
One of the jellyfish slips free and parachutes down through the waves. At this point, I wouldn’t contest the seafaring law on banishing women from the decks; some of us came with that kind of luck, festooned amidst our soft forms, between the folds of our skirts. Or it trailed behind us, like a shadowy vulture poised to pick at the carcasses we left in our wake.
I look up at the fisherman and despite myself, I smile apologetically; a gesture as useless as any curse I could inflict.
“Well, give it.”
I fix my stare at Pearl and keep my voice firm. “Politely now.”
She’s a few months shy of turning twelve; puberty is turning her frowsy and irritable, a sort of premature middle-aged crankiness. From her nest on her bed, I catch her mouthing her wrath: ’Motherfu – ’
A bolt of lightning shoots down my arm but stops at my hand. My grandmother had struck me once for embellishing my own curse on her in the middle of my own mouth-off. I don’t so much remember the strike as I do the impact; time has taken the edge off the looming arc of her swing, though not so much the crackle of my skin where she’d hit and the sparks of pain. I wouldn’t bring down the same on my daughter.
Instead, I tuck the magazine further away into the corner of my shoulder-bag and leave her room. What was once a peace offering is now a ransom; my silence in exchange for her disrespect, the fashion magazine promoting its special on Body Positivity as collateral.
Pearl will be up all night, frothing in angst, holding on to her rage as a ward against her tears. If my grandmother were alive, she would’ve prescribed lectures and hard labor; if my mother were around, she would tell me to let the hurricane blow over but never through.
“Through what?” I would ask her, dreading the answer.
“Through whom. You,” would be her reply. She would grin gap-toothed and hold her arms open as if to demonstrate how to welcome a storm. “I’m still here. Still standing after you wrecked me.”
My mother would have gently pressed her ear to her granddaughter’s bedroom door and not so much cackle than let out a series of exhales. She would then have looked back at me, rolled her eyes as if she had not once considered my own wildness strange and terrifying, as if it were a blood infection.
Because as it stands, that is how deep it runs; as blood. Just as they sing of in love songs. I’ve often wondered whether all that rage and restlessness was love gone to rot. And if, in the end – as all ruined love does – it would kill.
“Savage waters to tread,” Mother would have told me.
I turn off all the lights, except the one in the kitchen where Pearl will know where to find me when she needs to. She might not want to, but as I had once known, she would know which path to take when the tide of understanding came in.
“You were once gone ’til November,” Mother chastises me, from all the way back in her seaside shack. “Nothing but circumstance always brings us back to what we choose.”
“And the power of will.” I wanted to add. But by then, her voice has receded to the backwaters of my memory, where I had once trodden as a child, and now, run from.
I know for certain that there are no bodies in any of the three graves. The sea rarely gives up its spoils. For every drowning, you get what was left behind: the knots of hair still embedded in combs, the scent of musk and lingering perfume on the cuffs and collars of clothes that still line dressers, the handwriting on scraps of paper that still betray nothing.
In lieu of bones, stones are erected by the ones left behind. Out of the bleached granite emerge fantastical creatures: sylphs to usher light into the beyond and cherubs to sweeten the bitter tang of darkness that hovers over the unknown. Below, there are the names inscribed on the grave-marker, all of which, to a stranger reading them, ring hollow without faces to attach to. I raise my eyes and look beyond these, towards the distant ocean.
I ask them: Where will you go?
A few months earlier, I had visited two such graves at a different site. Neither of those two girls had been related; the sea had called to them at different times. But as my grandmother would say, “The saltwater binds like blood.”
Around that coast, they had called it an ‘infection’; it would either burn through and evaporate on its own terms or it would burn through and burn down. Still, it had been no small blessing to the province that it hadn’t spread further that that coastal village. Both the girls had wasted nearly to their skeletons before the drownings. “What a tainted miracle, to have been dragged down by the waves while weighing no more than a meagre day’s catch,” the villages had murmured.
The death ledger lists their names and ages, nothing to give away the color of their eyes, the hidden blemishes on their skin, the weight in pounds of their lifeless bodies lost to the pull of the tides. Following my last conversation with a close acquaintance of one of the girls, the young woman’s gaze had drifted to the shoreline and then upwards. I’d paused in my notetaking, allowing her to make sense of the thought that seemed to cloud her eyes.
It took her a while. Her lashes cast down, almost like she was sleepy, and her head bowed slightly to her side, turned away from me.
“Do they really turn to foam? Or do they…” Her eyes swept heavenward.
The best answer I had for her was the one I’d always questioned: “It’s nice to think of.”
I often pray that I’d never have this to give Pearl when she felt like talking, when she was up to seeking answers of her own. Perhaps if she never had to think about it, she would never have to bite down to suppress it.
“You and me,” I had once promised her, my face turned towards the ocean while hers burrowed into the old smell of my moth-eaten sweater. “We’ll make it through.”
The sound of my voice somehow echoes across the beach when I scream.
“We aren’t the ones casting the bait,” My mother used to assure me. “Neither are we the Seekers.”
Despite how I’d been raised, it had felt okay to rebuke her: “All we do is reel in the catch.”
“We’re witches, not fisher-folk.” She would calmly rebuke.
The first time she had told me this – plopped right into the midst of a stand-off in my teenage years – it rippled right through me. I muttered an incantation to myself (don’t freak, don’t freak, don’t freak) as her words swayed from my memories of the lop-sided fairy tales she told me at bedtime, praising the wisdom of sea hags, to the blocks of letters written in her steady hand, rows of names accounted for in weather-beaten ledgers.
I sometimes peruse old photographs of her and me; both of us solemn and softened in the distant haze of childhood. I picture my mother in a montage of stories, the ones where she crouches bent and withered over my bed, her voice steady as she recounted the tale of her last catch:
“A mermaid and a witch. Such bitter allies were we.”
That was how they all began. A woman with a tail with a wish to exchange it for a pair of limbs that were supposed to succeed at ensnaring what a song couldn’t: a human heart.
“But mermaids, they weren’t ones for compromises. Not all the way.” My mother’s voice would rise crisply over the mounds of sugarcane husks left over from the tall jugs of juice she carted about in the day. “Even if I’d let her have a voice and even if she’d sung like a plucked wire, even if she’d had him by the heart.”
She would stop then, as if it were a fact. With the sun beating down over our heads, we would stare at the murals painted on the wall right across from where she parked the juice cart. In gold-tinged colours, ripe with depth, were the old folktales that were passed down to children of a certain age: those old enough to discern fabrication, but not quite old enough to understand how they’d blind you.
“The kind of girls that think they’re half-fish, so that they can come up with excuses to slip away. Back to where they imagine they belonged. Somewhere vast and uncharted.” Mother would glance at me sideways, the thorn in her eye sharp as ever. “Legs only take you so far, as they’d say.”
It was then, with that gaze of hers pinning a hole in my heart, that I decided on the name for my own child one day: Pearl. It would be the final clasp on the pulsing ring of love for my daughter; secure and sacrosanct, the last word I’d call out to her before she eventually turned her back on me.
Stories always went around in circles and cycles, never forgotten, only buried, until they resurfaced. All that had changed since the beginning was the direction.
There is a certain madness I’m seeking; the very same kind that I’ve been walking away from.
The clever girls know where to run towards; the clever women know when to stop and take stock of their surroundings, whether on land or water, or the muddied depths in-between or even the murkier shores above land, where all good girls and women should hope to wash up on.
If you were real good, you wouldn’t cry about it. I’d had to learn this young, fed into my ears by a rotating choir of teachers in a school that decried the clumps of lipstick-stained tissues under the washroom sinks and the furtive glances at the boys’ end of the playground while classes were in session. I was taught to swallow my tears and lick my wounds in private; contain the flow, hold in the tide, do not bleed magic.
I was around Pearl’s age when I decided to go to war with my mother. There was a certain jangle to the words when phrased that way, a precarious razzmatazz that buzzed more discordantly than I’d have liked to admit. The modern-day word – puberty – didn’t rattle as much.
Unlike Pearl, I sought the floods. When the rains weren’t enough, I ran down to the sea and threw myself into the waves just to feel my pulse rise with the tide. No matter how far I tried to swim, the ocean would spit me back out to shore as if I were a mouthful of absinthe she was made to swallow.
It would happen all the time, so many times that my mother would barely bat an eyelid at my drenched form: “All that salt wouldn’t allow for the sweet blood of a sea witch.”
I would tell her to leave me alone. Later on, in the thick of those nights, I would lie sprawled on my bed, belly flat against the mattress, seething and electric with the fear of what was to become of me. Of what I was to become.
Now, I look to Pearl’s room, at her locked door. I picture her cradled in the shell of her own musky-smelling body, raggedy from the brooding that kept her awake and listless. And I wonder how she would emerge from herself, whenever that time came. Would she manage to gather herself together, hardened from having to procure those revelations from the hollow deep within her? Would she be relieved or resigned?
I think of a place that’s still clean, untainted by warm blood in the watery womb of the sea. Would it be right above me, far away, or right under my nose, beneath my very roof? I think of a cool place, dry, untainted by the drenching heat of fear, rage, and longing.
I cannot think of home because home is something you never have to reach for. You cannot howl for a home like a dog for the distant moon because a dog was once untamed and free, while you still possess the one flaw it longs for:
You never learned whom to trust.
“Trust is a weakness.”
This morning, my mother offers me this piece of advice the same way she’d offered deals to mermaids, selkies, sirens and the girls who thought they were. The last one who’d been to see her had wanted wings when she was a child.
“Her mother had kept little angel figurines all around the house when she was growing up,” Mother tells me this over a steaming pot of tea set on the old beech table, her cup already half-empty. “She said they haunted her. I often wonder who she was talking about then: her or her mother. Who haunts who?”
“The angels do,” I reply as flashes of porcelain-skinned seraphim skim through my mind.
“Oh, I know that. I believe the angels haunt all of us. But mothers and daughters, that’s something more shadowy.”
I sit across from her, watching the sun rise. I hadn’t learned to read constellations as a child, so the ways of the stars and heavens were lost on me. Mother would show me wildflowers instead; she wouldn’t tell me their meanings.
“Those are just stories, after all.”
I learned them from books anyway: roses for love, honeysuckle for devotion, lilies for purity. Whenever a new bride would come around, I tried to point her in the right direction to the orange blossoms which promised fertility.
Mother would only shake her head.
“Only stories.”
Like I’d done on so many mornings before this, I ask her for the truth. As always, it emerges in small foreign factions:
“Once upon a time, women lived by breathing seawater and fed themselves a drip of wishes, most of which curdled in their bellies and poisoned their blood.
“A long time ago, saltwater warped tears so that merfolk never felt them stream down their cheeks.
“During the time that has long since passed, the wails of lost souls beneath the sea, as wolfish as those of the animals that prowled the land, rose to the ocean-tops and crested even the highest waves.
“It was many, many years ago that the women beneath the waves craved flight and the women like you and I were the only ones who could grant them their wish.
“We gave them legs for wings once. They never forgot that.
“Before the bawdy sailor stories, there were the warning signs of lost souls at sea. Before they were said to crave flesh, they say the mergirls craved the light of seraphs.
“Wasn’t that how the story first ended? A leap into the waves, only to fall up into the Great Light above, all for the forfeit of a prince’s heart.
“Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, perhaps we’d known better, women like you and I. We kept our legs on the shore and our hearts chained to our ribs. That’s how we remained intact.
“Once, my sweet child, we were witches.”
On my way back, I meet another girl on her way to the waves. I remembered seeing her once before, her long hair gathered loose around her face as she bent forward for another bite of cake at the table in my-mother-the-sea-witch’s kitchen. She now has her hair wound back in a neat plait that hangs down her back, the sleek, curved end swinging with each step she takes.
I look at her and watch the sun limn her head with light.
When she steps in my path, I know not to ask why she’s going. It’s the old, old instinct of the wish granter, never the receiver. My mother no longer demands anything in exchange – “Let the ocean swallow them whole and young and full of life as they are.” – but I sometimes follow her gaze to the receding tide.
I think of Pearl, safe and trapped and tucked away in her room, in her budding, swelling, painful body. I don’t take my eyes off the girl as she slips out of her sandals and steps onto the sand bank, the sole barricade against the frothing water.
I hear myself call out to her, my own daughter’s name for I have nothing else so dear to call her by. As she scans the shore for my voice, I know it’s her own mother she yearns for in that moment.
It won’t last long. The sea calls to her just as it had to the girls before her. The sea and its terrifying glory, to whom the others were lost and to whom many more would still turn to find themselves. If they weren’t lucky, they’d find their legs turned to tails and the tang of salt filling their lungs. Not drowning, not quite, not yet, but for an eternity more than they would have on land.
And if they were lucky, they turned to foam, orphaned. They would drift up and away, finally cut off from a parent’s suffocating love.
All of their names, I knew, would be etched into tombs, the way all wayward girls were. It would be too wrong to speak ill of lost souls once they no longer counted as part of the living; they would be remembered well.
The girl whom I call ‘Pearl’ finally looks away and climbs over the sand bank, making her way to the sea. The light shifts and I see the black dragons that halo the crown of her head. Like the witches before me, I read them for what they are and no more. Those are the demons that haunt her, just as the seraphs haunt me and those of my blood.
She shifts her shoulders, then her arms through her dress sleeves, lets it fall and flings it away. Without a sound, she dives headfirst into the surf and kicks off.
For the longest time, as I watch her disappear, I think to myself and choose my words carefully: “Where will you go?”
