Lost at Sea

The cabin was on the very outskirts of Holly Brook bay. It had stood there since before the towns founding, before the bay was named Holly Brook even. The sturdy building stood a short stumble away from the water, which is probably why the bottom steps showed the obvious effects of water damage and decay. The cabin was surrounded by trees. The road that led to the building went from asphalt to gravel near Holly Brook proper. The road closer to the cabin was just dirt, but that’d been nearly completely covered by overgrown blackberry brambles.

The seclusion and damp monotony of the cabin made it the perfect place for Dahlia to lay low. Her duffel tossed carelessly into the first bedroom she came across after jimmying open the cabins heavy oak door. Her family hadn’t come up here in ages and it was extremely unlikely that anyone would make the trek anytime soon. Grabbing her thermos of black, bitter coffee Dahlia plopped into a slightly mossy chair on the back deck. Of the three handmade chairs facing out onto the dreary bay only two were intact and only the one she sat in really looked strong enough to hold her.

Dahlia sat in silently staring off towards the horizon line. The sound of water lapping at the shoreline just ahead and the calls of far off seagulls lulling her into a sluggish, morose state. The waves were calm today, white water only visible far beyond the shelf break Dahlia knew was a few hundred yards off shore. Everything else was painted in the shades of gray that Dahlia was familiar with. The color scheme she remembered from her chilly summers spent here when she was little and her grandfather was still well enough to make the chairs that they sat in for months each year.

The smell of the coffee faded as it cooled. The steam settling a little and making room for the salty scent of the ocean before her. The less she could sense the coffee, the more she had to acknowledge the smell of damp everything. The earth and foliage mixed into one sludgy, dark one-step-from-rotting scent. She felt a sudden urge to slam her hands into the thick mud at the shoreline, to let the clay mixed sand grab her and shackle her there. How simple it might be to let the gentle waves overtake her as the tide rolled in, to let it take her as it crept slowly onward to eat away at the steps of her grandfathers house.

Dahlia shook her head, mentally berating herself. She couldn’t just, fade to black, that wasn’t something she would be allowed. It was her turn to live a monotonous, gray life until she was 86 and could barely remember her own name let alone her family’s. The breeze coming off the water picked up making the trees shiver on the edge of the forest and Dahlia mimicked them. She took a final swig off of her thermos and slowly rose from her seat. As the wind died for a moment even the bird calls faded away. Dahlia stretched her arms to the sky, but was stopped as she tried popping onto her tip-toes. The roof was sloping lower than she remembered. She let her fingertips gather the moss and damp from the corner they’d grazed.

Dahlia dropped her heels to the deck, hard enough for it to make a soft rocking protest at the treatment. She looked at her fingertips that were now covered in green and dirt and more importantly the gray of this place. Technically there was running water to be used in the cabin, but Dahlia found herself moving to rinse her fingers in the sea before she could even consider a possibility of a more appropriate option. She let herself pretend that the place was consuming her, that the gray would take her over. That soon the color would leach out of her like it had the wood of the cabin, all the fabric that lived in the building, the forest behind her, and even her grandfather. The ripples of the water were hypnotic and Dahlia had walked nearly to her knees before she realized that she was at the water at all. It was cold, so much colder than she had imagined from the safety of the deck. She slowly lowered trembling fingers into the water and was vaguely intrigued to find the water was darker up close. She trailed her fingers through the flexible ice, making ripples of her own while she ran all the navy-dark-gray-steel-blue words she knew around her head.

She didn’t fear the water as the townspeople did, maybe she should. Dahlia had never even considered fearing the water though. It had a mind of it’s own sure but her grandfather had been of the opinion water wasn’t to be feared. Fear was to be reserved for the creatures that dwelled in the water and for the people on the land.

“Those are the only things that will ever harm you,” her grandfather had once said. “The water is a vessel for nightmares, not one of them.”

The words of her grandfather swirl around her as she sank down to her neck in the frigid water. She let her head lean back, hair fading into the water and gently tugged with the waves current. She sometimes wondered if he’d known. If her grandfather had understood that the women he held closest to his heart were the same as the nightmares from the water he warned her of. Grandma had called it a curse, a disease that haunted all of the women that shared her blood. The blood of her mother before her, and her mothers mother. She had mentioned, only once and muttered quiet enough to be written off as an accident, that Dahlia’s great-great grandmother had called it a great gift. Grandma had only ever seen it cause pain.

The curse worked in mysterious ways, she’d explained when Dahlia was younger. It took Dahlia’s mother when the woman was barely past 30 years of age. Grandma told outsiders it’d been cancer, caught much too late to treat, but Dahlia had seen her mother before the coffin was closed over her. Dahlia had seen the vines and thorns sprouting out from her mothers skin. Great roots, delicate ferns, and muted flowers slicked in her mothers blood. Her Grandma had found twelve year old Dahlia stuck in place, staring into the box that held what used to be her mother. Grandma had swore, a thing she rarely did, and bundled Dahlia away tucked into her coat.

Grandma didn’t know exactly why the curse had presented that way in Dahlia’s mom. She didn’t know why it presented the way it did in any of them. She showed Dahlia late one night, the way living things did as she urged. To Dahlia it just looked like her Grandma was staring into space, but then moments later there had been raccoons and foxes and a great many other night creatures surrounding the front steps. They stood at a sick sort of attention just beyond the steps for several long minutes before Grandma must’ve given the order to disperse. Grandma had promised to tell Dahlia why she didn’t like to use her curse when Dahlia was much, much older. Grandma’d died before she’d considered Dahlia old enough to tell, though when Dahlia spent time with her grandfather she’d had her theories.

The water came a little higher and Dahlia let her head drop below the next wave. Dahlia had assumed that, when she didn’t ever start sprouting greenery or find herself surrounded by critters at a thought, she was safe. She thought that maybe the curse had missed her, skipped over her. Maybe the blood was finally diluted enough to escape the bloody end of her mother, the fear her grandmother had lived with until the day she passed on. Then, she’d sunk a ship. Dahlia let her face break through the surface of the water and walked back up the shore. She brushed her dry hair back behind her ears with her no longer trembling fingers.

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