Wild Dark Shore

by Charlotte McConaghy

I turn away and take in the island instead. Tall green mountains, their tops shrouded in gray mist. Rocky cliffs. There is a prehistoric feel to it. An overwhelming sense of the ancient, of time, and of something chilling. It is the bones, I think, and the bloodiness of the kelp, the black sand, it’s the colors and the isolation and the outlandishness of the animals, the mist, I feel overwhelmed by the place, and despite its beauty I am frightened.

I can picture the ship, anchored a little way out. Can see their dinghy rowed in, men climbing out onto the black sand. Surrounded by such astonishing creatures, and, what’s more, by the miracle of their trust. Animals who had never learned to fear humans. I feel sick, actually, and the vividness of the vision feels beyond me, it feels outside my body, like something I am being shown. I have a sense, now, of why this place feels so … creepy. It hangs upon the air, the memory of this violence.

“No, this cave has been here a lot longer than the seed vault. It was used by the nineteenth-century sealers. A storage room for their catches.” Meaning once upon a time it was filled with the dead. I can see them laid out before me, all those creatures we passed outside, hundreds of them now lifeless, and it isn’t the first time I have resented the vividness of my imagination. I don’t like this room. I don’t like being down here.

To live for your children seems a normal thing, a respectable one; to live because of your children is something else. Mine are the blood of me, and the oxygen in that blood, the airflow and the neurons firing and the stretch and release of muscles in limbs, they are the foundations that make up my skeleton, all the collagen and calcium upon which I stand and fall, and the pulse and the flow and the beat.

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

“Maybe we will drown or burn or starve one day, but until then we get to choose if we’ll add to that destruction or if we will care for each other.”

There is such peril in loving things at all, and he feels sort of proud, in fact, that he just keeps on doing it.