Feather

by Gaynor Jones

Connor sidesteps cigarette butts and broken bottles – the Saturday night residue of a flailing seaside town. His stomach roils, then empties, the wet stain spreading dark onto the pavement below like a shadow. A seagull flies down to peck at his mess and he kicks at it, disgusted. Someone once told him feathers are a message from the dead but here they’re everywhere. Nuisance birds. It’s bullshit anyway. When you’re gone, you’re gone. Connor wipes his mouth and jumps the railing, leaving the glaring arcade lights behind him. He stumbles toward the waves, calling him so loudly that he doesn’t notice the woman until she speaks.

‘What time is it?’

Her voice is calm, like the shallow water pooled around her feet. Connor pulls out his phone and slides up the brightness. The woman flinches.

‘5 am. Jesus, I should be in bed.’

He shouldn’t have come here, not tonight. To his side, the pier taunts him, reaching out into the sea like a skeletal arm, flesh all gone.

‘We have a little time yet.’

The woman is not old, but stoops as if she is, her body hunched. Connor puts his arm out as if to guide her, but to where?

‘Time for what?’

The woman cranes her head toward the still-dark sky, but doesn’t answer. Connor wonders if his brother looked up at it, or only down. The woman steps away, further into the water, then kneels, her hands milling from side to side like it’s a warm bath she’s settled in and not the freezing Irish sea.

Connor shakes his head, drugs maybe? He should help her. He could.

‘Listen, I’m not sure you should be out here alone.’ He waves his phone at her and she recoils again at the light. ‘Is there someone I can call for you? Family?’

‘I had a sister. But she died.’

Connor puts the phone away, pushes his brother’s goofy grin from his mind.

‘I’m sorry, how old was she?’

‘Seconds.’

‘Seven?’

‘Seconds. She slipped out first, you see, and I didn’t know, because inside, we’d been fine, we’d floated together in the dark – no, it wasn’t quite dark – flashes of something at times – but not enough to cast a shadow.’

‘You can’t remember that.’

‘Oh, but I do. My sister wailing then silenced, my father the same. It was my mother – even in her delirium – who saw.’

‘Who saw what?’

‘The light.’

‘Riiiiiiight.’ Connor stretches the word out as if he’s solved a mystery.

‘She saw what it did, what I did. She raised me in darkness, but now … now I seek the light again.’

‘This what you do is it? Round up the sad drunks on the beach and get them to convert?’

‘Are you sad?’

Connor means to snort at her, but only whimpers, a meek, sorrowful sound.

The woman dips her head. ‘I wanted to go with them, you know, but I couldn’t.’ Connor tries to stand but his legs are wedged in the wet sand beneath him. He doesn’t remember kneeling down next to her. Something scuttles by then quickly disappears into the murk, and his skin itches as he thinks of all the creatures just below the surface. Waiting for a worm curled on a hook. Or for a person to jump.

‘Go with who? Where?’

He thinks of his brother, the scrawled note crumpled in his car.

‘I can show you. Here.’

The woman glances at the horizon, where the sun has lifted above the water. Her skin is smooth and pale, but her eyes are pure black and Connor jerks when he sees them.

‘You’re one of those tricksters from the boardwalk, a fortune teller or something.’

‘I only want to understand.’

She leans toward him, and hovers her hand above his, so the shadow stretches low across his skin. ‘Please, tell me how it feels.’

Connor’s hand has gone at the wrist where the shadow fell on it, but there’s no blood, only the flesh, dry and pink with a white core, butcher-sliced meat.

‘Please, tell me where it’s gone.’

She moves her hand further up and Connor’s arm is there and then it’s not. He tries to push down, to propel himself from the sand, to get away, but the hand has gone, because the arm has gone.

‘Please, tell me. I can’t do it to myself, you see.’

The woman passes her left hand over her right arm and Connor watches the shadow there, as if this is normal, as if he hasn’t just lost a limb. But what’s one more loss anyway? The woman’s skin ripples and a hazy smoke coats the fair hairs. She smiles sadly, and Connor thinks of his brother, his brother, his brother.

‘I want to know, don’t you? Where they all go?’

Connor nods. He does. The woman’s eyes flicker, something behind the black. Connor just has time to think of his poor mother, two sons and both gone before her, and then the woman moves her whole body over him. He feels each part of it because her shadow can’t cover all of him at once, her body is slight and as she writhes above him she splits him into smaller and smaller parts, lines and lengths, and he feels his bones, his veins, his arteries and his cells and it’s not darkness he feels, it’s light, and he wants to tell her and he starts to open his mouth while he still has it … but then he doesn’t feel anything at all.

The woman stands and walks down the beach, her shadow trailing long beside her. A seagull glances past, hungry for whatever it might scavenge. It hits the dark and vanishes, leaves behind a lone feather, spinning in the wind.