Today I am sharing with you a short story I recently performed at a storytelling evening. It’s a fairy tale.
My music recommendation for today is Toothsayer by Tanya Tagaq
She had always loved the ocean. From where she sat, perched precariously on the platform dangling from the side of the snow white cliffs she could see the waves lapping against the rock on windy days, the ocean slowly consuming the land and taking it away in its gentle caress. In a few hundred, maybe a thousand years, the ocean would have seduced the land at last and taken every piece of it into its endless depths. She would have to find a new job when that happened.
If she raised her eyes toward the horizon she could watch the fishing boats coming back from their time at sea, or the ferries carrying their passengers from one shore to the other. Often, when work was slow and the cliffs appeared as white as the foam of the waves, she thought about their destinations, imagining wild and exotic lands, adventures and freedom. She imagined them. Never had she actually considered descending from her hut up on the cliffs to leave, to see for herself what was on the other shore, for who would paint the cliffs while she was gone?
People just assumed the cliffs had and would always retain their beautiful white color, but this was not the case. The myriad of natural forces buffeting the clean, white faces of the cliffs often left their marks. There was a very specific art to it, the painter thought. A meditative rhythm in the mixing of just the right shade of white, a challenge in making her work become invisible, having it appear so natural that it blends perfectly into the rocks, each mark a masterpiece that is always seen but never realized.
No one except for the lighthouse warden knew about her or her job. She would sometimes join him in the evenings and they would stare out at the water together as the warden told wild tales of his time at sea. In turn, the painter told him about the things she had seen the small people in the town do from her ramshackle hut on the cliffs. The lighthouse warden was, the painter thought, in his nature often like the sea might be if it could speak. His voice told the climaxes of stories with the crescendo and excitement of crashing waves and the subtle details with a pleasing tone like the water retreating across the beach’s sands. He had looked after the lighthouse up on the highest part of the cliffs for years now, making sure the beacon was lit every evening and the ships made it to safe harbor on gentle waves. He welcomed the painter’s company to drive away the loneliness in the summer evenings.
On one particular night the painter told the lighthouse warden about a small child she had seen playing on the beach from the top of her cliff. The child would create castles from the sand, throwing up high walls and deep moats around the castle’s bulk to keep the ocean from pulling it back into it’s wake.
“If there is a sand castle, I thought to myself,” the painter said to the warden “surely the castle must also contain a sand king and surrounding it must be a sand kingdom, and like in every kingdom there must be hardships for the sand peasants and families, sand heroes and villains, friendships and feuds, and of course the king and his knights must have a lot of questing to do, with all the other kingdoms competing for superiority.” then she paused for a moment and frowned out at the ocean.
Just when the warden thought she would not continue and her anecdote had ended, the painter turned to him with an utterly distraught look on her face, “Like all kings though, the sand kings believe their rule is eternal when it is just a single grain in an hourglass, and like all kingdoms it will be swept away by one single wave of billions in the ocean of time, torn down in a second by an ocean that will not have it’s power challenged, and then, from the grains of the old kingdom another child will build another kingdom and the sea will still always be above its creations.” she had tears in her eyes now. “When the sea finally pulls in my castle, devours my little kingdom,” she looked out at the small town, down her snow white cliffs to the beach below, “what happens to me?”
The storm landed just a few days later. The warden had spoken of a change in the wind, but the sky had remained clear and bright until this afternoon, when dark clouds began to stumble and fall over one another, piling up in the empty sky. The once blue and gentle sea roared with anger, foaming and crashing in gray, choppy walls of water onto the shores. It didn’t let up for much of the week. The rain continued rushing down, wind thundering around the town and the painter’s hut, rattling the windows and tearing off the shingles. On the fourth day of the storm, she started to worry. How must her cliffs look by now? Battered and broken by the elements, the thought of returning and seeing them in such a state was too much to bear. She decided to check. Swiftly she gathered her tools, fixed them securely to her belt and, before she could have a change of heart, pushed open the door of her hut against the pressure of the raging storm.
The way to the cliff side was short but excruciatingly slow. The constant barrage of wind and rain quickly soaked her to the bones, and her equipment weighed heavily on her, buckets clanging together, adding to the cacophony of the storm. When she wasn’t far from the drop, she quickly tied herself to the wooden stake she usually used to rappel down the cliff side. Slowly she inched her way to the edge. As she approached the cliff edge she could see her beautiful, white, sparkling cliffs had turned gray and muddy with the storm’s runoff.
It may have been providence, or bad luck, or the will of the world. Whatever it was, it had picked the perfect circumstances. A gust of wind blew into her coat and she stumbled. Not far, but just enough to send her toppling over the edge of her cliffs. The constant rain had muddied the once hard, sturdy earth, and the sudden force of the rope going taught, the weight of her and her equipment was enough to pull her anchor from it’s mooring. She didn’t feel scared on the way down, and all she could see were the grey, brown, and white streaks of what had been her masterpiece. She was barely aware of the ocean that enveloped her, pulled her in, covered her, and held her tight as the waves crashed ceaselessly onto the shore.
The light that pushed into her field of vision was strange. It shifted and flickered. As though many shapes were passing in front of it. She opened her eyes and for a brief moment the image before her could not be resolved.
She thought her time had come, and the face staring down at her with a worried and relieved expression would guide her, take her hands, and gently, delicately lead her to the end of all things. “Thank god, you’re awake.”
As the silence broke, so did her death. The world inhaled and suddenly she was aware of the noises, the bustle of people around her, the doctors’ coat on the body of the face that had spoken.
“One of our cleanup crew on the coast found you. You got incredibly lucky, there’s barely a scratch on you. I’m still going to have to do some tests to make sure that you’re…” The doctor’s calm bedside manner was interrupted by two frantic medics rushing a stretcher into the room. “We found this one under one of the boats. Looks pretty bad. They’ve lost a lot of blood. We’re really going to need a hand over here.”
The doctor quickly excused himself. In the commotion surrounding the new patient, she silently slipped away. It’s what she was good at, going unnoticed.
She made her way out of the many connected tents that formed the makeshift hospital and now stood just on the outskirts of her little town. The storm had finally passed and golden light shone down through the thick grey of the clouds. The buildings loomed larger than they had from her vantage point up on the cliffs. Their paint not nearly as crisp as she had thought. The storm had taken its toll. As she walked further into the town, gently probing forward as if this place, her place, might vanish at any second, the damage revealed itself. The streets had flooded, and the waters had torn away mailboxes and crashed through windows. The ground was littered with roofing shingles, trash, and various other forms of refuse the ocean had washed in. Several of the buildings she passed had collapsed, with neighbors and other helpers coordinating to pick through the rubble, hoping to find someone still unaccounted for.
She recognized places she had dreamed of while looking down from her hut. The little bakery, whose bread she had often imagined eating and seen people carry out under their arms, was empty. It’s doors and shop window were caked with mud, and not the smell of fresh pastries, but ocean stench and mildew hung around it.
The wind still howled, and the shutters clattered noisily against the building’s sad, ruined windows.
The wet sand gave way softly beneath her feet as she stepped onto the beach. The wind blew wildly through her hair and tossed it’s strands this way and that, just as it did the spray of the ocean’s waves. The cool droplets, gleamed and glittered in the sunlight.
Flotsam had gathered on the shore. Driftwood lazily let itself be pulled and pushed on the currents. Her gaze fell on something half buried in the sand.
She bent down to investigate. A child’s shovel, forgotten on a past beach day. Smiling, she turned the weathered tool over in her hand.
She glanced back at the battered seaside town.
“They’re going to be okay.” a child’s voice said from next to her. She turned towards it.
“How do you know?”
“They always are.”
In their hand, the child held a bucket. They gestured at the shovel.
“Do you want to help?”
A pause, a brief glance up at the lighthouse on the cliffs. Then she nodded slowly. She got down in the sand and began to dig.
As they worked, digging moats and throwing up towers, the child told her about the town and it’s people. The baker, with her penchant for chatting with customers, the doctor, who took his job so seriously that he knew everyone in town by their first name, and the lighthouse warden, who no one ever saw much, but who fed the seagulls and whispered quietly to them. The first ferry after the storm sounded it’s horn just off the shore. She watched it until it was just a small dot on the horizon, and yet she felt closer to being on it than she ever had. She smiled at the child, their work completed. Hand in hand, they walked back to town, ready to give whatever aid they could.
The castle stood stalwartly on the shore. Similar to those before it, but different, just like the others had been. The ocean lapped at it’s walls. A portion of the battlements fell away. And high above, the cliffs sat and watched, ready for the patterns of time to leave their marks.