Wild Dark Shore

by Charlotte McConaghy

And she loves Shearwater, maybe more than any of them do, but she can see that, little by little, the island is killing them.

It is only the living who have the power to harm.

I’m here, she says, and it’s like she is, I can feel her breath on my cheek, against my lips. I am not so far gone that I don’t know it’s a lie.

“One day soon enough, everything is either going to burn, drown, or starve, including us.”

I will have to tell my kids who she really is. I will have to warn them that she’s a liar. I’m not sure when or how to do this.

I was changing her nappies yesterday, and today I am grappling with the reflection of my failures in her too-wise eyes.

he doesn’t like losing control, and this new person among them isn’t controllable.

He’s been standing at his wardrobe, looking at the precious things hidden within, talking to them.

She only ever takes one item at a time, so he won’t notice. One day, when they’re all gone, he will know, but by then it will be too late.

The heart of a whale is the heaviest on the planet. It is big enough for a human to swim through.

His eyes meet mine, filled with the same sense of impending disaster.

despite having wished he’d leave me the hell alone—I miss him.

“I know Dad loves me. I just don’t know if he can see me.”

Life seemed so short.” “It is, I guess,” I murmur. “It doesn’t feel that way anymore,” Dom says. “It feels very long.”

He wonders at the kind of person you’d have to be to hate shelter, to want only exposure. The same, he supposes, as someone who has to punch and punch and punch. Longing takes on different forms.

Claire is not an actual ghost but their father’s grief and loneliness made manifest,

I am also aware that this willfulness makes her more dangerous.

though I had thought this island’s botanicals were sparse and bleak, I realize I just didn’t know how to recognize their abundance.

“I dunno, maybe. Why can’t I just lie around? I don’t owe anyone suffering or working. So much fucking working.”

had this insane drive to build a house that would keep my sisters safe. But it was stupid, and I’m sick of trying to make things that will survive this world because nothing can, anymore.”

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.

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.”

I’m fully expecting it to be dead, so this doesn’t surprise me.

This is why I don’t usually ask him what the voices say—because his answers are terrifying.

I get the feeling he’s been told not to talk to me about any of this.

“Stop,” I say. “Don’t get too close.” “They won’t hurt us,” he says. “Maybe not intentionally!”

The fact that I’ve dreamed the same thing twice in this room is as disturbing as the dream itself.

The seeds of the deadly pitcher plants sit, gathering dust, in a far corner of the vault.

He never took the time to discover my body, he never explored it for what it could offer aside from the obvious, he never found in me, in my essence, a purpose other than to carry children, and when I admitted I couldn’t do this for him he turned away from me. He had no more use for my limbs or my skin, my muscles or tongue or fingertips. He couldn’t even see me anymore, my flesh. I’m not sure that such a turning away could exist in the same body as love. I’m not sure it’s possible to make so small a thing of love. I think love expands when it needs to, it adapts, it embraces.

She is not mine. Still, I wait for her.

“Why did you have kids if you weren’t going to bother keeping them safe?”

But something about the ring of it makes me unsure if he is talking to me or his dead wife.

“I’ve always wanted children but she kept saying it was wrong. Bad for the world, bad for the kids. I thought it was just an excuse but she was so fucking right. This world is a dumpster fire.”

That was a man who said he loved her. She does not understand.

Whatever happened, she is not responsible for it.

“I think it suited me to be with someone I knew would never look directly at me.”

It is just a body but it was yours, and beloved.