Wild Dark Shore

by Charlotte McConaghy

“The world’s not a good place for a child.” She frowns. “That’s not true. Look around.” I do. And wonder what she can see that I can’t. What I can see is an ocean rising so swiftly that this extraordinary island, this home, will be gone in the blink of an eye. A place so unsafe that most of its occupants have already fled.

“It’s not a good idea to fall in love, okay?” I say softly. “Not with people, and not with places.”

“I loved a landscape and watched it burn,”

An island made of the earth’s crust and rising as those crusts push against each other, and still not quickly enough to escape the sea snapping at its heels.

“What struck me was how often he’d hear from the wives of the sailors who’d set out here. They’d contact him—Morse code back then—and they’d ask if he’d seen this ship or that ship yet, and could he please tell them if William was still aboard and healthy, or John, or whoever. And I started to think about how so much of a keeper’s job is to wait and watch, holding men’s lives in their hands. And I’d dream, in those days, that my wife, that Claire was out on a ship at sea, and I was up here watching for her, and if I could just keep the light on I’d show her the way home.”

And I can understand why he might not, in fact, be alright. Why maybe none of us will be, because we have, all of us humans, decided what to save, and that is ourselves.

The world is dangerous and we will not survive it. But there is this. Impermanent as it may be.

But here is the nature of life. That we must love things with our whole selves, knowing they will die.

But I also think of how my husband taught me something else, something so deeply wrong I am stunned that I ever believed it: that in the face of world’s end love should shrink.

I think I finally understand your words. It’s just a body. They hold on or they don’t. You’re right, it’s nothing to be frightened of. Mine will become the salt of this water. And every time you swim it will be me upon your skin.

She catches me and holds me so tenderly, and I know her. She is his mother, and she died so he could live. I understand it so simply now, it is a love that lives in the body but unlike the body it never dissolves. It lasts forever.