The White House by the Sea

What will become of the world, little one?

How will we make and unmake things

Until they are strange and new?

*

They lived in the white house on the outcrop by the sea. The wind was always blowing and the days were always a half-darkness of dense grey clouds, syltasi’va in the tongue of their grandmother. Always, the clouds.

The girl walked the shore, a rugged, uninviting thing pockmarked by water and volcanic activity, a cool burgundy flecked with grey. It scratched at her young feet, already toughened from exploration of the coast. It had a face, the coastline. The steep angle of the grassy bluff frowning into the chalky white of the cliffs, the stretch of rock and sea, and the tiny house perched above it all. It was never silent, the wind whistled and buffeted and the water rumbled as chasms between waves were filled in by the swell of it against the rocks. But it was somehow quiet as well, because the girl did not speak, only listen.

The family rarely spoke. When her father was home from the southern township he often retreated to his workroom, a rickety wooden attachment that creaked in the wind, to mend his fishing nets and whittle at the bleached bone driftwood that the girl had found by the shore. Her mother cut up vine figs that grew in the long tangle of grass that whipped at legs in the gales. Her sisters lit candles that smelled of sour fruits. They had been made to be placed on windowsills, so that red wax ran and pooled and hardened in volcanic rivulets. Her brother practising his Issarian calligraphy, walls covered in papers crammed with blue ink scrawl, a cursive text that meant nothing to her. They all sat separately in quiet reverence of the world outside, the world that roared and blew and crashed across the cliffs.

They sat and waited for a rain that came only once a year.

One dark morning, the girl left the house without her boots like always, wrapped in an oversized skincoat, and made her way down the path to the shore. The grass there was flattened by innumerable footsteps, a thin yellowed trail that slipped down the bluff and trailed the side of the cliff down to the rocks, where the pebbles and shells crunched underfoot. Dead shellfish crumbled beneath her toes.

She took her time staring into the usual pools, watching tiny, colourful things crawl into fissures, little gold fish that spun and swam in clear, endless circles. She found a stick that she could use to poke at washed up debris, playing with the weeds and the sea foam stuck quivering on stony sponges and strange, half-faded things washed up from the deep. The seabirds shrieked against a grey and distant sky that refused to rain. The wind whistled around her, tossing her dark locks into her eyes. It brought with it the dry smell of a distant place and the salt sliced from the ocean’s turbid surface, salt that filled her nose and lingered on her tongue.

Under a weathered plank by the sea’s edge, she found a locket. It was icy in her tiny fingers, the silver worn and scratched by rocks against the spiral etchings. It was as perfectly round as the sun she rarely saw, and the chain wound around her fingers easily. Prising it open, she found that it held only a small, dull black stone and had to quash the little piece of disappointment inside of her. It shut with a click and she tucked it into the warm fur lining of her pocket, withdrawing her fingers and rubbing them together for warmth.

Out, amongst those roaring waves which towered like castle spires, she thought she saw something. A dark arching movement over the swell, glistening like the scales of a great fish sliding beneath the surface. She watched for a moment, straining to see through the sloughing and churning of dark water. There was nothing but the waves.

The wind kept blowing, all the way back up the bluff to the house.