The Sea Does Not Forget
by Paula Henry-Duru
It is hard to ignore the wind as it rattles empty bottles, snaps off branches, and yanks clothes from washing lines, but the people of the island are used to such weather and the wind does little to rouse them from sleep. The gentle patter of rain announces the arrival of a storm, but there is something wrong in the way the dark clouds sit firmly in the sky.
The last hour before dawn seems to stretch infinitely, and down by the beach a stranger sits before the angry waves and waits.
The stranger thinks to herself how, in the deep waters the rain had always felt like an idea rather than a real concept. The way it breaks the water’s surface without reaching the bottom of the sea is vastly different from the way it behaves here on land. Here, the rain is as real as the damp sand beneath her, and she tries in vain to flick droplets off her scale-covered arms. She will never understand what had drawn her sister to this place.
When her sister had first asked about the human shores, she should have shut it down immediately, but instead she had allowed her sister’s vague inquiries to grow into follow-up questions, and then ultimately, an obsessive need to see the shores for herself. It had taken her three weeks to find her sister on one of the many islands scattered across the sea, but by then it was already too late.
No matter how hard she tries to blot the details out from her memory, she remembers this: her dead sister tied to a stake by the very people she had come to see.
Her deep green scales were smeared with blood and missing in several places. Her webbed hands and thin wrists were rubbed raw from where she had tried to pull herself free. Her face was gaunt and cracked from hundreds of hours in the vicious heat, and hanging neatly above her broken body was a sign that read ‘CURIOSITY.’
Amidst the crowds, the stranger was paralyzed with the knowledge that if she tried to take her sister down she would meet a similar fate. So instead she did nothing, and quietly returned to the sea.
She allowed her rage and grief to fester like a wound and grow into something terrible. There in the dark depths where monsters thrived she gave birth to a storm and nursed it in the cold. She fattened it with visions of an all-consuming nature and when after several months the storm grew teeth, she set it free.
Finally, she swam back to those shores while the storm slowly made its way to the island.
At present, the stranger on the beach grows giddy with excitement as the light drizzle becomes a steady pour. She imagines her sister had once stood on these shores with wonder in her eyes and she has to bite down on her fist to stifle a scream.
A small wave rolls in, kisses her webbed feet and caresses her ankles. She is surprised to find that the feeling is not unpleasant. The rising sun struggles and fails to peek through the dark rain clouds and she allows herself to smile for the first time in nearly a year.
As her storm gains momentum, she thinks of the visions she fed it which she knows will come to pass. In them, the people who had once chased and bound her sweet, naïve, sister wade through flooded streets and bob helplessly on tables in their rooms. They pray on their roofs to all the wrong gods and then finally at the end of her visions, there is nothing at all. In short, it will rain and rain and rain until the tallest structure is completely submerged and every inch of the island is swallowed whole by the waves.
There is no one outside except the stranger, whose final task is to take her sister home. Even amidst the now-torrential rain, there is still the danger of being seen by any of the islanders who have stirred from their sleep, but the thought of being able to properly bury her sister far outweighs the fear of getting caught.
A shiver of anticipation runs down her spine and after two deep breaths she pulls herself up from the sand.
As the sea behind her thrashes and lightning briefly illuminates the sky, the scaled stranger with a hole in her heart begins to walk towards the center of the island where the corpse of her sister remains tied to a stake.
The Molotov Cocktail 