House by the Sea

February 10, 2019

     Scraped hands and knees. A mouth full of sand. Salt and cedar smoke in the air.

     Each time I wake here, it’s the same. 

I stumble into consciousness with no recollection of how I’ve come to be here. I am a plastic bag washed up on their shore. An empty bit of refuse, hollow and tired.

     How long has it been? A few months of freedom, perhaps. A few months of peace. Sand is encrusted in my beard—sand that will cling to the crevices of my body for months to come. By the time I’m free of it, I’ll be back to collect more. I sweep my hand upward to my broken head. I can feel the cursed sand collected in my nostrils. It swims around in my mouth and grinds between my teeth.

     I roll onto my side with a groan and look at the house by the sea.

     Its brown shingles are loose like it’s a poor attempt at a gingerbread house. The white trim is chipping and dirty from years of neglect, but the flowers and herbs in the little window boxes are well tended. A floppy-eared goat, its rope leash tattered and frayed, bleats at me and continues to graze on its patch of grass near the house.

     The storm above is brewing like a hungry stomach. Maybe today it will devour me. 

     I see her, bathing in the outdoor shower, her long black hair slick from water and washing. I can’t tell which one she is from behind—they look so alike. She turns to me—she knows I’m here because she called me to her—and gives me a knowing half-smile, mirthless and cocky. Her naked curves are a mountain range I’m doomed to wander until I succumb.

     I rise, not bothering to wipe the sand and blood from my knees and hands, and go to her. She strips off what remains of my clothing which isn’t much. It was lost in the journey along with my memory of the journey itself. She washes me with a black bar of soap that smells strange and herbal.

     She takes her time and works me over—they always do—until I’m exhausted and beaten. Until my body acts of its own, spellbound accord, and I beg to be free and rest.

     They never let me rest.

     I cup my hands under the water and swallow as much as I can. I know it will be long before I’m able to nourish myself again. 

     Inside, the other sister is making food. My stomach turns over on itself at the smell. Thyme and rosemary and some succulent meat. But the food isn’t for me.

     Beads of water cling to my wooly beard. I remain naked. (There’s no use in bothering with pretense, and my tattered clothes are outside at the shower.) They know every part of my body, anyway. Every inch and corner. The parts I don’t know myself, their fingers and tongues and anger always finds.

     The first sister goes to the second and helps her remove a roast bird from the little wood-burning stove. I dare to sit in one of the chairs that circle the small table. My damp skin sticks to the unfinished wood.

     I don’t know their names.

     They’ve never spoken to me. 

I’ve heard them moan and cry out. I’ve seen one pull the dark sheet of hair from the other’s ear and whisper things there.       But their language remains a mystery to me. 

     The first is broader. Fierce. Rougher and taller. The second’s waist comes to a smaller point and her voice rings slightly higher. But she bites.

     When I was a younger man, the encounters intrigued me more. But I’m tired now. I cannot marry or move or hide, because I will always wake up on the shore of the ocean by the house of the sisters. And I will never know when.

They finish the tasks that busy their hands, and I’m dragged to the small bedroom with the yellow walls. 

     I know what to expect. In the little room, I’ll be kept for three full days, made to work like an overwound toy. Constantly turning and starting and breathing and beating. Sometimes the moon is visible through the clouds framed by the little window. Sometimes it’s full and pregnant with my pleasure and my suffering. Sometimes it hangs like a shadow of itself—only a sliver of itself, like me. Like what I have become.

     On the fourth morning, I’ll be cast out and made to swim. The ocean will be frigid and full. I’ll be sweaty and empty. The juxtaposition is always jarring. I’ll tread water until I lose consciousness, and when I wake, I’ll be home.

This time, I plan my escape.

​

                                                                                             ***

​

     It’s dusk and the sisters are sleeping. One is on the floor, curled up on herself like a cat on a warm hearth. The other is propped on pillows, and spread out, taking up most of the bed. I’m exhausted, but I don’t allow myself to sleep. I watch my breathing, keep it deep and constant. The sky is an angry woman, crying and throwing her tears at us. I seize the opportunity of the storm and silently thank the sky for its noise and its cover.       At the foot of the bed, I slip from the sweat-stained blankets to my feet. The wooden boards creak slightly beneath me. Damn these floorboards.

     I swallow my hesitation and walk out to the kitchen. The carcass of the fowl that was their dinner sits near the basin sink. I rip a piece of leftover meat from its bones and devour it. I can’t help myself. A sprig of rosemary sticks between my teeth. I wipe my fingers on my chest and press onward.

     There is another room down a small hallway I’ve only been to once before. Though it’s storming and the sun is setting, there is still light in the house. But this room is covered in dark tapestries on every wall, blacking out the day. The air inside is stale and devoid of the smell of ocean that fills the rest of the house. I let my eyes adjust to the low light. Even the sound of the storm has been cast out. I can almost make out music, far off and foreign—angry drums and a burning melody.

     Last time, this room frightened me, and I shut its door and found my way back. But I’ve lost the will to fear anything but the sisters.

     On a table at the center, an ancient book sits closed, it’s binding woven with gold thread and its cover made of some strange hide. It’s surrounded by half-burnt tapers the color of raspberries and small bowls of dark liquid. I strike a match and the sulfur burns my nose. With a lighted candle, my grease covered fingers flip the pages of the book. 

It’s full of strange symbols in an unknown tongue, but I don’t need a translation for the illustrations. A needle and small dagger through a bleeding heart. Flaming men in tall hats. All manner of birds, beheaded—songbirds and falcons and seafowl. A winged man, arms outstretched, with a crescent moon at each hand. He looks outward, toward the reader. He raises an eyebrow me, and I slam the book shut.

     My heart seems primed for escape, clawing its way up my throat, but I take a moment to settle myself and for the blood to stop rushing in my ears. To my right, a small wall cabinet is filled with little glass bottles of dried herbs and tinctures. One large mouthed jar catches my eye. Full of purple-black nightshade berries and leaves and flowers. If what I recall of the plant is correct, I can’t touch it to my bare skin without suffering the consequences myself. But I also recall that the leaves aren’t deadly like the berries.

     I open the jar and pinch off a finger full of leaves. I blow out the candle and return it to its place. When I exit the room, I close the door behind me as quietly as I can. The music I thought I heard is gone now. Only the sound of the storm remains. The storm and the ocean.

In the kitchen, I bend and open the door to the ice box. Inside is a jug of fresh goat’s milk. I pour some of its cool thickness down my throat and swallow like a kid at the teat. I drop the leaves in the milk and stir it vigorously with my fingers, hoping it will be enough. I fetch the evidence from the milk and hide the sodden leaves in the cavity of the discarded carcass, which I place on the table. My hand still drips with the remnants of ivory milk. In my hunger, I nearly lick my fingers clean. But I remember and dip my hand in the basin of water, which swirls in opaque spirals. I pray the sisters’ black eyes won’t notice the change in the color of the water. 

     The light is weening from the sky, and the storm is moving onward, to mourn over someone else. I strike a match and light the candle that sits on the table, hoping the second match will mask the smell of the first. I sit and begin to pick what remains of the meat from the bird. Without the white noise from the storm, I know they’ll soon wake. 

     I’ll admit to one offense to cover the second. The more serious one. Admit a little and keep the rest.

     I’ve picked over the carcass fully by the time the first sister finds me. She calls something to the other, and sweeps the bird out from under me, throwing the pan into the basin sink. She yells something.

“I’m sorry,” I say, though she’s never spoken my language.

     She leans in front of me and puts her face to mine, her brown breasts swinging like pendulums. She grabs my chin and pulls me as close as possible to her, my beard caught like fishing line around her fingers. Her eyes are impossible black things, unknowable things, full of anger and indignation, and her nostrils flare like that of a bull.

     The other sister joins us and laughs angrily. She kicks the chair out from under me and I fall to the floor, my body slapping in comical sounds and reverberations of pain. One takes my feet and the other takes my hands, and with strength I once would have doubted women could possess, they carry me back to the room with the yellow walls.

It starts again. The song in my head that drives me to respond when I only want to go home. The cries I hold in my lungs. The urge to hold them down and scream my name into their faces. 

      When they’re done with me and go to nourish themselves, I see them drink the milk, dipping some baked pastry into its yellowed thickness. They eat it to mock me, they drink it to watch me thirst.

From my spot on the ground where I lie depleted, I smile. It won’t be long now.

​

                                                                                         ***

     The sun is rising on the second day when the women have digested their breakfast of milk and belladonna. I stand over one in the bed and shake her slightly. Harder. I slap her face. She moans a bit, but stays unconscious.

I go to the other. She sleeps with her legs apart, like roads diverging at a warm, wet split. I pull her mouth open, trace my thumb over her lips. Her breathing catches in her nose and she snores awkwardly. She remains asleep.

I feel like I’ve reclaimed a bit of myself. My manhood. My charge.

     I walk, brazenly now, to the little dark room off the hallway opposite the kitchen. I take the old book and the box of matches from the table and head outside. 

     The sun is just cresting the waves, and the morning mist chills my naked self. I fetch wood and prepare a pyre. 

Somewhere, some morning bird is calling, calling. 

     The air is so wet, I have trouble burning the book. The wood won’t take the flame.

     The book falls open to a page with an illustration of a woman in a long dress, dancing and moaning beneath a full moon, her breasts exposed. Her eyes beseeching.

     I hold a match directly to the page. The illustration turns her gaze from the moon and looks at me, her face contorted in shock or perhaps pain. She screams. It’s a low, terrible sound like a horn. Like an animal. 

     The fire creeps across the girth of the pages, and the whole damn thing ignites into sound as much as fire.

I hear the running footsteps a moment before she tackles me. One of the sisters—which I can’t tell—mounts me entirely, pummeling my naked body with her big fists, while the other stamps out the fire with bare feet. How did they wake? How did they rouse from their drugged sleep?

The book continues to cry. Ten thousand screams. I cover my face and my head. The beating continues and the wailing continues.

     The book must be extinguished now or fully burnt because it falls silent. 

Somewhere over me, she’s kicking me with sand covered feet. 

     I struggle for breath and taste copper in my mouth and on my lips.

The birds are silent but the goat bleats. 

The one who put out the fire is at me now and slips a tattered rope over my head. Before I can struggle out of it, she slips it tight and pulls me by the leash at my throat away from the smoking pyre. The sky begins to shower. Slowly at first, big wet drops that crack when they land.

She ties me to a steak in the ground, likely the one used for the goat, I assume calmly. Why is my brain wondering mundane thoughts when my throat feels broken and I can’t breathe? The woman curses something at me, spittle breaking free of her angry mouth and raining on my face. They have never spoken to me.

I pull in raspy, mangled breaths.

     “You, Ethan of Maine, you will die,” she says in an accented, staccato voice. “For this you will die.” 

     She speaks to the foliage around me, muttering some ancient chant, and the vines grow over my body, pulling tight around my wrists and chest and legs. I’m manacled and choking and struggling against it. She laughs.

     “Stupid,” she says. It is the first and last time either of the sisters will speak to me.

     On the beach, the other is digging, digging in the sand. Scooping handfuls out of the dirt. The one who spoke joins her, and in a frenzy, they dig. And dig. And dig my grave.

     I struggle against my bonds, and dig myself into the ground beneath me, making little motions, little inches toward freedom. The vines cut into me, but I persist. It’s now or never. It’s now or death.

     I glance towards the sisters. While one digs, the other dances around the hole. Every so often, they switch. 

     The hole has grown impossibly deep and wide. I can no longer make out the sister who is digging. I only see the constant deluge of sand springing up from the hole as if on its own accord. 

I get one hand free, and begin to pull at the vines, sharp as wire, from my body. My blood slicks my hands and impedes the process, but I persist. I pull the rope from my throat, and cast it aside.

I’m up. Up and running and off. Full, breakneck speed, everything I have is thrown at the fire ignited in my legs. Away, far away.

     I wonder if they watch me from the beach.

     I wonder if they see me go.

But I don’t look back.

     In that one glorious moment, sanguinity supersedes my adrenaline. I have hope. I am hope. I am light and free and floating.

     Rather.

     Rather falling. 

     Falling into the massive hole in the beach.

     I feel my ankle crack beneath me when I land like a sack of rocks, tumbling into the hole. The air in my lungs is thrust from me when my back hits the bottom.

They look down at me, their faces framed by the storm. The sky spits angry drops against my face.

     They kick the sand over me. They begin to sing, some foreign song, as the bury me in the cursed sand, and the daylight begins to disappear. And their song becomes muffled.

     Bleeding hands. A mouth full of sand. Salt and cedar in the air.

     Every time, it’s the same.

     Even in the end.