Pixel-Stained Technopeasantry! "Study of a Young Man as the Monster Takes its Meal"

Published in 2009 by 

A wet black crescent of a beach, formed of smooth, dark rocks, polished and rounded by the tide; the waves here are quiet, the sky is dark, though the sun brightens a patch of it and makes a silver circle, like a mirror that doesn't show, just shines.  The fishing people who live in this harbor will tell of how hands and feet wash up on this shore, and the little crabs that scuttle in the hollows, shells kelp green with watercolor blooms of blue, search the gaps and hollows between the stones for dead-stranded mussels and flesh turned white and flaky under blue nails.  They do not know where the lost limbs come from, or why they come here.  There is a monster in a deep sea cave at the end of the beach, but he, they agree, is very careful with his meals and he eats all he takes.

When the monster rests, and when the tide is out, you can hear his breathing, syncopated with the sound of the waves.  No one says what he looks like, if they've seen him.  At night, he gives off light like a miniature, flickering sun, and sailors can see his cave for miles.  Some people think that the hands and feet come from ships that wreck out in the shoals, their navigations ruined by the light, but no one has seen a wreck in many years.  No one has seen a ship in many years.

Dannay has not seen her pretty boy in many days.  She went to the house where his parents live, they like her, but the last they saw of him was early Monday morning when he went out in his boat with his nets.  His own boat, his own nets, he was proud.  Dannay was proud of him, too.  Everyone was. 

Dannay asked her friends; they had been closer before she caught her boy's pretty eye, but they were close, closer now than they had been for most of a year, Dannay noticed.  They wrapped her arms in sympathy like kelp strands, but they knew nothing, and their looks and arms around her shoulders made the girl want to panic.  She fought that panic, a girl of the sea needs to know how, the water is a good place to die and panic is the sea's best accomplice in murder.  She knows this and she won.  She took a round mirror from her mother's chest and a lantern from the wall, because the night her pretty boy left was also the night the light of the monster took to prowling in the dunes. 

The sea is a murderer, and the sea is, so they say, possessed with a spirit like that of a woman.  Dannay's pretty boy could have caught the sea's eye.  Dannay's pretty boy could be giving a hand or a foot to the beach. He could have caught the eye of a selkie girl with silver hair that fell to her heels and a silver coat that she could wrap around and swim the waves faster than her pretty boy's little boat could ever go.  They lived on the islands just far enough out that you cannot see them from the shore.  Dannay's boy was better than them, sea and selkie, she was certain; her boy was clever as well as pretty, tough as well as clever.  The sea might take him one day, but in a storm, or in the chill of winter and the selkies never cared for humayn'ts; they grew so old and gray and spotted skin so fast in selkie eyes. 

There were other towns along the coast, one to the north who shared their monster, one to the south that didn't.  Dannay had never been, but she did not need to go to a town to know there were girls in those towns, ones that might be prettier than her, cleverer, fewer freckles, longer hair.  Her friends said so, but because they were jealous; maybe they could not see it, but Dannay did.  It had to be the monster.  The monster or her boy was coming home.  These were the only reasonable choices.  Dannay was willing to prove it. 

The stones are hard going.  Large enough to bruise the feet, small enough to shift under any weight, wet and smooth but heavy.  They gnaw at Dannay's shoes, grind at her feet.  The waves come in, high tide, loud enough on the stones to drown out the sound of the monster's breath.  The crabs that eat the remains dodge the waves and the skinny legged, sage colored birds that eat them.  The cave doesn't look like a cave from this angle; it doesn't look like anything, just anonymous, sooty rock at the far edge of the beach, but everyone knows where the monster lives.  Warriors have come out, some who can sweat swords of esoteric metals out of their bodies.  They do not come back to town, but the monster always does.

They say the monster is afraid of the dark, which is why he carries light with him, everywhere he goes.  They say, if you could get him in darkness, then you might be able to kill him, but no one has.  Most people, even the monster's closest neighbors, don't know how he keeps his light on.  The ones who find out tend not to survive the learning, but you should have already guessed that.

The monster's doorstep is close to the tide line, close enough that it must flood at times when the sea is high.  There is a lip of rock, almost too high for Dannay to boost herself over that lies just inside the opening, and from there, the cave slopes gently down and back a few yards before turning a sharp right to a steep slope into bright, flickering lights.  Dannay hears a gobbling, slurping sound.  A wet, dull tear, a wet slap, a deep low crunch.  Her gorge rises.  She pushes it back down, keeps her teeth locked together.  The monster is taking his meal. 

Dannay would leave, but the waves are lapping up against the lip at the mouth of the cave, now.  She would leave, but nothing is proven.  She sees the faces of her friends in sympathy.  She sees the face of the girl she saw driving the wagon through town a year ago, and how her hair caught the light of the sun and held it like a crown.  She sees the sleek bay seals, watching the cave-mouth from the rocks beyond with their black eyes.  She turns back to the earth and her back to the sea.  She turns the first corner.

The sounds of eating, the tooth noises, the tongue noises, lip noises, they are louder, but not yet loud.  The cave curls downward like heavy smoke, hollowed out with hundreds of alcoves, floor to ceiling, each filled with a lamp or lantern.  Blue-green kerosene quivers in their reservoirs with the movement of the earth and the sounds of the feasting below.  Dannay looks at them, at her own lantern that she will not need, but dares not blow out for fear that what they say about the monster and darkness is true.  She wonders what he does when the cave does flood.  She wonders how he keeps the lamps and lanterns filled, where he gets them, where he gets his wicks and fuel.  The cave slopes down to another sharp turn.  The flames of the lanterns and lamps flicker as she passes, when before they had been still. 

The monster does not see with light; he feels with fire, or tastes, like a snake tongue.  The flames flicker; he must know she is here.  Dannay would leave now, but the water is spilling over the lip, now, and to do so, she would have to swim.  She would leave but she cannot make herself go slowly, and if she runs, her passage might douse one of the flames, and then he would be at her.  She descends, she turns the corner.

The slope becomes steep and long, the ceiling high; there are thousands of lamps, here, cut glass and crystal, brass, lamps of quality and cost, lamps that Dannay has never seen, cannot guess at the price and cannot guess why a person would be moved to pay so much for something that sheds light.  Again, the cave descends and turns sharp to the right, where the light seems to have broken into jagged pieces of color.  Down below, the sounds of the meal are louder still, not quite loud, but enough that Dannay, if there were any words in her throat, would have to talk over the sound.  The flames bend toward her; those ahead lean into her coming, and those behind flicker at her leaving.  Dannay moves slowly, and in her mind she holds the image of lobster pots. 

Dannay would leave now, but there's a thin stream in the middle of the cave, flowing down, and she knows that the waves are starting to push into the cave.  She would leave but the flames in the lamps have turned against her like the barbs in a fish hook.  She knows that pulling against them will tear her.  Dannay begins to cry, and her hand on her own lamp begins to shake, but she descends and turns the corner.

The ground here is very steep and Dannay has to steady herself with her hand on the wall, or lean back to touch the floor behind her to make her way down.  Here, there are lamps like she has never seen.  Shades made with cut stained glass, blue, green and red; lamps painted with the faces of children and angels, lamps with tin shades cut with the shapes of demons and flames that spin as the hot air rises and cast shadows.   The cave descends like a smooth, stone staircase to a landing that again hooks to the right.  The sound of the monster's meal is loud now, too loud for Dannay to hear anything else.  The sound of the eating, and the broken fragments of color and spinning shadows cut into Dannay.  They remind her of a bird's crop.   There is a space at the landing, an empty alcove, just large enough for a lantern, plain and rusted among the wonders that spin and break the light into bad, dark rainbows in the earth. 

Dannay could leave now.  These lights do not feel for her.  The stream of water seems to have stopped or dried.  It is hot down here and the air is dry.  Danny would leave now, but the sight of the empty alcove, for some reason, offends her, and that offense, somehow, that lack of symmetry runs deeper than the fear.  She places the lantern in its space and pulls the round mirror from her pocket. 

The monster takes his meal just around the corner.  The level floor of the cave, the volume of the sounds, the smell of blood, they tell her that.  Dannay leans against the stone of the wall and feels the pulse of the monster through it.  She reaches out, her thumb and her forefinger clutching the mirror. 

In her mind, comes the image of it slipping through her fingers and falling with a crash to the earth.  Seven years' bad luck, and the monster turns and runs her down in his larder.  She forces her hand not to make this happen. 

She cranes the hand out.  She sees nothing but lights.  Candles stacked on candles, all of them burning high and bright like little howls at the ceiling of the cavern.  She reaches out further and sees still more, banks of them like in a church, like a kelp bed, dense and swaying.  She stretches until she can feel her shoulder crack and sees a flash of pale skin.  A young man's chest, a nipple, a ripple of ribs and stomach muscles, and a mess of wet red and shining white below.  She sees it turn, manipulated by a force invisible to her mirror. 

What she sees has no arms, no belly, nothing below, no head.  It tumbles over and over, diminishing in the grip of something she only ever sees as the flash of an angle.  There is nothing there she recognizes for certain.  It could be her pretty boy.  Now, now she prays it's not.  She gives him to the selkies and the girl with the sun in her hair and her friends to share, one on each day of the week.  She gives him to the sea.

Dannay could turn this corner and see for herself.  There might be proof here in the monster's chamber among the candles that do not seem to melt.  She puts the mirror in her pocket.  Her pretty boy has run off with another, or else he will be home.  If the selkies have him, they will tire of him when he is old.  She will be old then, too, her children grown, her husband gone into the pyre never knowing he was her second choice, never suspecting for a single day.  Maybe they would be together then.  She climbs and she turns the deepest corner.

If the girl with the sun in her hair has him, maybe she can keep him, and maybe she cannot.  What she can't keep, Dannay can't and what neither girl can keep, Dannay thinks, is probably not worth keeping.  What neither can keep is probably a rake and a cad.  She turns the corner in the middle, where the sounds of the monster and the sounds of the sea are equal.

If the sea has him, then Dannay will cry for him, and maybe he will taste her tears among the salt water and think of her.  Dannay will live, because the sea may as well be God; if the sea decides, then Dannay will abide by it.  She can't do otherwise.  She turns the last corner. 

Dannay climbs to where she can see the mouth of the cave, to where the alcoves begin.  She hears the barking of the seals, and how they sound like human voices from the echoes of the cave.  Dannay remembers, for the first time in months, that there are boy selkies, just as many as girls and she smiles.

The last lantern sits and gutters in the sea breezes.  Dannay remembers a game she played with her brothers and sisters once when her dad was at sea and her mom was visiting their grandma near the end.  They all sat in the dark house around the table and one candle waiting for the child who was it to blow the candle out and try to catch them in the dark.  Like all the best games, this was not you can play when your parents are around.  Like all the best games, it ended in misdeeds that could not be hidden and sore switchings.

Dannay lifts up the shade on the last lantern and holds her breath.