Queen of the Sea

Seaspray crackled against my cigarette as I drew a long puff.

This was my favorite spot on the coast. It was mostly secluded, except for the occasional circle of potheads sharing a spliff. The evening was dark, cut through by silver winks of moonlight on choppy water. Somewhere below, at the foot of the sea-cliffs, the sound of gulls bickering rose between the crash and hiss of the waves.

The smoke rushed from my mouth on an angry sigh.

I had just been let go from my job at the bank. Things were getting better with the vaccine rollout, but not enough to keep me employed, I guess. Fiscal year is looking up, but not up enough, they said. Gotta trim the fat.

Weird thing for a bank to say.

I was grateful for a peaceful night, anyway; no rowdy kids laughing over a bottle of Jack, no loved-up yuppies getting it on with windows rolled down. Just me, the sea, and my emergency cig stash.

I thought for a moment about what I would tell my boyfriend. Sure, we’re a couple of DINKs now, but he only just got back into the workforce. Things have been tight for us, and this wasn’t about to make it any easier.

I fingered a cold, metal hoop in my pocket. My keyring: the keyring which held the keys to my car, our house, our mailbox. My head raced with thoughts of bills and insurance, our beloved dog, our mortgage. We had plans for a wedding.

With another drag on my cigarette, I got back to my feet and dusted the sand from my slacks.

Pushing back against a rising panic, I squeezed my eyes shut and took in the sounds of the shore.

It was the best soundtrack for a troubled mind, a harmony of gulls chirping and keening; of waves breaking over pocked stone; of wind rushing over the reedy cliffs. I tried to push thoughts of tomorrow out of my head, and let their echoes fill the space left over.

But then, there was also a sudden plucking on the air, echoing like a chord from a gentler guitar. There was a harp-like quality to it: soft, and with quiet power. It whirred, and died, and struck again – more broken and fainter with every attempt. A cry of rage and frustration followed shortly after.

Well, so much for a peaceful night.

I looked around me curiously, flicking the butt of my cigarette into a nearby trash receptacle. Brushing the wind-tossed strands of hair behind my ears, I peered out over the cliffs.

At first, I saw what one might expect: a long stretch of sand black with the night, washed over by frothy bands drawing in and out of the sea. The beach was at high tide, and the water shimmered under clear skies.

Another wave pounded the cliff, sending a mist into the air.

As it cleared, I saw him: a man in the distance – little more than a silhouette – seeming to struggle against the pull of the sea.

In a panic, I abandoned all thoughts of mortgages and cars and staggered down the carved stairs at the cliff’s side. I tried to call out to him – “Sir, sir!” – knowing he couldn’t possibly have heard me. I stepped out onto the smoothened sand and turned the bend of the cliff.

My pumps filled with seawater as a wave rushed in. Chunk, chunk, chunk, I went, stomping through the tide. The water was up to my knees, now. I held my phone up, flashlight on, and tried to navigate the scene in front of me. Another wave surged into me, knocking me forward; I held fast to my phone, but that was it for my business suit.

A note from that instrument rang out once more, even over the crashes of the sea, and I saw the man a little clearer, now: a dark figure, huddled waist-deep in the water. He tossed his head back and let out another pitiful cry.

I slowed to an uncertain wade through the water.

“Sir – are you alright?”

The figure’s head snapped toward me and hunched over itself in the moonlit dark.

“Go away, you girl,” it croaked. “Do not want talk!”

“I’m here to help you; you sound like you’re in trouble.”

“Go away,” he said again. “Broken thing make sad Etepē. You not Etepē. Cannot be sad. Cannot understand.”

I snorted. “I might not be a, uh – Tepay, or whatever, – but my night’s not going so well, either. Do you want to talk about it?”

The creature’s eyes weren’t very clear in the dark, but I could still feel them on me, measuring me against something in its head. It crept closer through the foam with long, bony legs, clutching something dear to its chest.

“You want talk Etepē?” it asked with a rasp. “Etepē not make fear?”

“Fear?” I asked, but too late.

My phone’s light flashed in its large eyes, cloudy like an angler’s, and its skin was wan and pulled thin over sharp bones. Its head, skull-like, hung with stringy hair that looked like it had never been washed. Its long arms, bone-white, were folded possessively over its sunken chest.

I stifled a gasp.

I don’t know what came over me then. The sudden loss of my job and the inevitable struggle that would follow, I guess, gave me the courage – or the abandon – not to run at the sight of him. Perhaps I needed a friend as badly as I believed he also did.

“No, not fear,” I said at last. “Sometimes, we just need someone to talk to.”

And I meant it. The poor guy was probably just down on his luck, I thought.

As we waded back to the steps and came under the yellow cast of a streetlight, I saw that he was entirely naked except for the dripping mop on his head. I brought him a blanket from the trunk of my car and, to my surprise, had to show him how to use it.

Sitting there at my secret, not-so-secret smoke spot at the top of the cliff, my head brimmed with questions. But first and most important of these was, “You smoke?”

Etepē cocked his head, his bulging eyes nothing more than confused slits. “No, I say already: call Etepē, not Smoke. Silly question – useless.”

The cigarette took a moment to find a space under my lip, so bewildered I was. I couldn’t stop staring at him, at the smallness of his nose, the strangely mottled sinew of his arms. I held out the cigarette pack in a clearer gesture of offering, but he seemed just as confused as I was, so I dropped it.

“Tepay…” I started, unsure of how to approach the many, competing questions simmering in my mind. “You have an interesting accent. Where do you come from?”

“I come from Under,” he said with a wry smile. “Heluul agte-reng tohts.”

I blinked, incapable of even lighting my cigarette.

“’ Under,’ huh. So… is that, like… Australia?”

Etepē laughed a hideous, watery laugh. “Hoss-Dralia? Your words, so funny! – like child-words!”

I glanced so sidelong at him that I must have pulled an eye-muscle. There was something off-putting about his demeanor, in the way that his head lolled with a slung neck, in the constant curling and uncurling of his taloned toes. The blanket, normally used for our small dog on road trips, fit his lithe shoulders like a great cape.

Cupping a hand over the end of my cigarette, I sparked the lighter and drew a hit.

“So,” I said, mouth full of smoke, “What were you doing out there?”

The sullen creature considered this for a while. He turned his head, one bulging eye never taking itself off me. He muttered something to himself that sounded like a dog gargling vomit.

“Not trust,” he said at last, turning both his cloudy eyes to me, “But so kind, you. Not fear, not flee. Make talk Etepē. Make warm.”

He raked his long, greyish fingers over his barren chin.

And as if the thought had just crossed his mind, he added: “And pretty, you.”

“If you don’t wanna talk about it, that’s fine, dude—”

Suddenly, he opened the blanket, revealing the full span of his lanky arms as he did so.

I coughed smoke and motioned for him to make himself decent. Then I realized what it was he was showing me.

In his lap was cradled a thin object, like a flute. It was a beautiful thing: a kind of glass shell, amber-white in the streetlight, dappled with dark circles along its spiral. Several spouts fanned out from its middle, each descending lower than the last.

Relieved now that he wasn’t flashing me, I couldn’t help but laugh at the absurdity of it all.

“Is that a bong, dude?”

He frowned indignantly. “No, not Bong-du. She call Mwereng-mē, no other name!”

I pushed the palms of my hands into my forehead and sighed through my nose. His answers were really starting to irk me.

“Okay, and what exactly is that?”

“Mwereng-mē. She is… Queen. Queen, singing always, making song, making listen: water, always, she listen, too.”

“…Well, sorry I asked.”

“Queen… dead,” he muttered. “Singing no more, only in away. So quiet, Queen; so sad Etepē.”

Fiery motes fluttered off the tip of my cigarette with a flick. I looked into his colorless eyes and saw a profound grief there. Whoever this Queen was, it was obvious to me that she meant everything to him.

“I’m sorry to hear that, Tepay.”

He flinched as my hand touched the thin knob of his knee. I drew it back, but wondered at how cold and clammy his skin was.

“Is… this her instrument?”

His head perked up at the word. I rushed to clarify – “Does it play music? Does it… does it ‘make song?’”

Etepē leapt up at once, gurgling with a strange glee. “Song? She singing, so perfect, so best, she singing. No song better. Water listen, too.”

“The water listens too, huh?”

“Yes. Water listen and water rise; water listen and water dance!”

With that, I put my cigarette out on a patch of sand and rose to my feet. I had to see this for myself.

“Can you show me?”

“Show?”

“I want to hear the song,” I said, tying my hair into a bun behind my head. “And I’m sure the sea does, too.”

Whatever pupils Etepē had shrank under the yellow glow of the streetlight. He looked up at me in wonder, and maybe fear, before a wide grin pulled the thin skin of his face. His teeth were jagged and yellow.

“I play,” he said. “You come.”

I abandoned my pumps at the top of the stairs before we picked our way down its steps. Burying my toes in the cool sand, I pressed myself up against the sea-cliff and folded my arms against the misty breeze.

Etepē shed his blanket in the wind and held up the strange instrument to the light of the moon. He garbled some prayer or command in his tongue, terrible to hear but rousing to listen to; the seas crashed against the cliffs and carried his words in an echo.

Submerging the shell, he revealed the froglike shape of his body: his knees arched inhumanly as his pelvis dropped beneath the waves. He stood again, lifting the strange instrument from the foaming sea, water spilling from its many spouts. With spindly fingers, he plucked at their streams, and, to my awe, a sound rang out like the fluttering of a harp.

A glow grew in that shell, blinking for a moment, and failed. The sound, a shrilling note, died with the light.

Etepē sloshed back to me, shoulders heavy with dejection.

“No more she sing.”

“Tepay,” I said. The blood was still thrilling in my ears. “Can… can I try?”

Again, those large, hazy eyes fell upon me with unknowable calculation. He held the sacred shell to his chest, but, ever so gently, he eased into his trust. His arm, longer than half my height, slowly unfurled, the neck of the shell cradled in the curl of his fingers.

“If you break,” he said quietly, “I kill you.”

“I understand, Tepay,” I whispered. A part of me believed him.

As I stepped out into the open of the sea, the wind ripped my hair loose. I looked down at the pretty thing, held carefully to my chest. I fingered its enamel grooves, feeling the spouts erupt from its ridged spiral. It was light and carried the wind through its pipe with a soft hum.

Gingerly, I knelt and submerged it under the water at its calmest point. When the bubbles stopped, I lifted it with my left hand, and tiny falls of water poured forth from its spouts.

With my right hand, I plucked at the streams.

A great note broke over the waves, and the waters grew still. To my surprise, this jewel of a shell kindled like an opal of day: iridescent, resplendent, bearing the fire of the sun in its color. I looked back at Etepē, who was flailing his arms in encouragement.

“Play! Play, you girl! Make song!”

The shell’s brightness grew in its intensity until I could see the red polish on my toes under the stilled water. The streams never ran out, but flowed on, constant strings waiting to be worked by a musician. I plucked them again, and the sea, a calm plain of water, trembled at the command.

Another note, and another, and the sea drew back from the shore. I gave it a more complicated melody, and it flowed inward, even up to the steps of the cliff.

I laughed to myself in disbelief. There was salt on my tongue: from the sea or my tears, I couldn’t tell.

Never in my life had I played an instrument until that night.

But how I played!

For a time, I made the sweetest music; the seas parted before me, lifted me gently upon its waves, arched overhead like a river in the sky.

“Tepay…” I said, turning, the fiery jewel blazing in my hands.

But as he came into focus, I saw that he was joined by two others. Rising from the waters, they lifted their arms and drew back in a kind of bow.

“Queen Sea,” they said in unison, “Mwereng-meid huul ngter! Mwereng-meid huul aster! Mwereng-meid huul mwedter!”

I almost dropped the shell.

“I’m not your Queen,” I said. Suddenly, the instrument in my hands, a torch against the dark of the sea, seemed less beautiful to me. Its fire was not my own, but borrowed from these creatures – and in that moment, I no longer wanted it.

My heart seized as Etepē and the others melted into the waters, kicking forward with shadows like frogs. I brandished the shell as my only weapon.

They emerged from the waves nearer to me, and Etepē, gentle and sweet-speaking, said, “So wise, Queen; so good, Queen; so kind, Queen. Not fear, never fear…”

“Back off, Tepay,” I warned. “I don’t want to hurt you, but, but—” My voice broke with fresh horror.

I lifted the shell which shone like a false sun and said, “I will smash this.”

But the others were on me before I could do anything else. One plucked the shell neatly from my hand, the other tugged at my suit.

“Come, Queen,” it said with the same gargling speech as Etepē, “Join Under! Not away, never away, but near and singing! Sing, make song, make listen all!”

I cried out for help as those creatures circled me like sharks. With the shell out-of-hand, the seas grew choppy again, and the sand receded under my feet. A scream ripped the chords of my throat as they took my hands and pulled at my hair.

I kicked and I fought. I scratched and I bit.

The light of the surface grew dim as they dragged me under the crush of the waves. I saw a new sky, roiling in the night: crests of foam passed like clouds. The fractured face of the moon faded blue as we descended deeper and deeper, and in that sunless place, only the greenish glow of the shell could be seen.

I loosed one, final cry as hope left me.

But with that scream I blew out my last breath, and I have never breathed the air of the Above since.

Mwereng-meid hyep-huulti ngei; mwereng-meid hyep-huulti asdei; mwereng-meid hyep-huulti mwentei