The sea washes over the shore again,
gentler this time. She is sitting waist-deep in the salty water, clinging to my
arm, pulling me deep beside her. I’m not supposed to be here. Mum said no ocean
today, no wet feet, no ruined shoes — but the sun is glowing low like a secret,
and my shorts are already damp at the hem, and she’s laughing in a way that
sounds like something spilling. So I give in. I let her pull me down until the
backs of my knees hit sand, and I sit beside her, half-submerged. Her hair is
soaked, and there’s a sticky, glistening smear of raspberry ice cream at the
corner of her mouth.
She doesn’t wipe it. She never does. She
lets things melt. She lets them run down her wrists and into the bend of her
elbow, and she licks it off sometimes, grinning like it’s magic. Once, she told
me sugar felt better when it dried on your skin. Like something sweet had
kissed you.
Without even looking at me, she starts talking.
“What did you do for your project?”
Her voice laces around my bones — not like
a blanket, but something thin and lovely that still lets you bleed through. I
still can't put a name to her accent, but Mum once said her family was from the
south somewhere — that’d explain her golden skin next to my winter-pale arms.
She called me a ghost the first time we met. Said I looked like something that
would haunt a playground. Then offered to trade sandwiches with me like it was
normal.
“Ummm. Nothing special,” I say. “I’m doing
mine on the Greeks. They’re kind of messed up. Couldn’t really figure them
out.”
She hums softly, and the silence creeps in like mist. I
watch the way the wind tangles her hair.
She looks at me without blinking.
“The Romans,” she says. “Mine’s on them.
They’re cooler. Did you check the books upstairs in the library? There’s more
stuff about Greece there.”
I nod. “I’ll check. Thanks for saving my project.
Again.”
The sun starts to dip lower, and
everything starts tasting different. The tide’s coming in, and the water clings
colder to our legs, but we don’t move. Summer’s slipping out of our hands like
sand, and it’s a long while until we’ll be back at the beach. I twist the
drawstring of my shorts tighter, wishing it meant something.
There’s a bitter taste in my mouth now.
Chocolate, from the cone we shared earlier. The one from the stand down the
road where we used to bet on how many pigeons we could chase before we got
yelled at. She always won. She always won everything.
A seagull screams above us — sharp,
jarring — and something twists. The air smells too clean. Too sharp. There’s
salt crusting at the corners of my eyes, and I don’t know if it’s sea spray or
if it’s—
Whatever.
We’ve been quiet a while when I ask,
“You ever go out far? Like, when you swim?”
She’s digging her toes into the sand, watching the foam
pull back.
“Sometimes. It’s nicer past the break. Calmer,
weirdly.”
“Not scary?”
She shakes her head. “It’s not like it
wants to hurt you. It just… keeps going. You stop mattering after a
while.”
I laugh, but it feels like swallowing a stone.
“Sounds fun.”
She hums. “Might go tomorrow, actually. Just to see how far
I can get.”
I want to say don’t go, but it stays trapped in my throat, tangled up with all
the sand and spit and maybe-tears. She gets up, pulling on my arm again. We
walk back to our houses and say goodbye.
We don’t hug. We’re too old for that.
Mum yells about the salt on my clothes,
but her voice sounds far away. Like I’m still at the beach, dragging the sea
behind me in my footprints.
I stop going to the beach. I don’t say
why. I just stop. I stay in my room with the blinds drawn halfway and wait —
wait for the curtains in the blue house across the road to twitch, to open, to
reveal anything.
They don’t. The windows stay shut. Rain
comes and makes everything greyer than it already was. The blue of the house
bleeds into the color of drowned things.
When they told me, I was halfway through
my homework. I was reading about how the Greeks invented astronomy. How they
mapped the stars before we even knew what dying in space meant. Mum came in
without knocking and hugged me so hard I dropped my pencil. Then she told me
things. Things that didn’t sound real. Things that hurt my ears.
I’m already grabbing my shoes. Mum calls after me, but I’m
not listening. My heart’s too loud.
I’m already out the door.
When I reach the dunes, the sky is too bright. The sea
looks normal. Like nothing happened.
But there are people. Shapes. A knot of
them near the rocks. Something orange half-covered by a towel. An ambulance
parked crooked in the sand, doors yawning open.
I didn’t cry until later, when a single
bead of water slid into my mouth while I was lying on the dunes, and it tasted
like her — like salt and something too bright and gone. I felt it sting the
back of my throat and realized my face was wet.
Mum pulled me into her arms. I didn’t stop crying.
Her shirt smelled like salt.
At one point, we visit the blue house
across the street. Something about pleasantries. We eat dinner. It's chicken
and pasta. The chicken is dry, and the pasta is way too salty.
No one finishes their plate. We all just
kind of push things around with our forks like we’re waiting for something to
happen. Or not happen.
I go upstairs to the room with the
curtains not open for a week. It still smells like raspberry ice cream and
ocean air. I sit on the floor and touch the spine of one of her books. Her name
is written on the inside cover in orange ink. There’s a tiny dried flower
pressed between the pages.
It crumbles when I breathe too hard.
The air tastes like salt.
I go back to the beach.
Not on purpose. I was just walking. Or
maybe not. Maybe I was following something. a smell maybe. Or a feeling.
Something like homesickness but it’s not for a place.
It's colder now. The wind stings a little. The sea looks
tired. Or maybe I do.
I step into the water. Let it soak my
shoes. Let it steal the heat from my ankles, my knees, my ribs. I don’t move. I
let it take. Because that’s all it does. Take and take and take and never give
anything back.
I sit in the spot we always sat, even
though the sand was wetter, darker, and cold. I bury my fingers in it. Feel the
sharp crunch of something broken. Maybe shell. Maybe bone.
They said it was sudden. I still don’t
know what that means. It’s not sudden if it’s been happening since the first
time the sea tasted her ankles. Since the day it touched her dress and decided
it wanted her. It’s not sudden if the ocean drags you down soft as a kiss,
fills your mouth with salt and your chest with cold and your head with silence.
It’s not sudden if it’s always been
coming for her.
Mum doesn’t get mad at me when I come home soaked to the
bone, crying into a bowl of cereal.
Her shirt smells like salt when she hugs me.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bilge Bayhan is a high school student born in İstanbul who got shoved into writing back in grade six by her language arts teacher—and she just… never stopped. Most of her stories end up in the graveyard she calls Google Docs, but sometimes they make it out alive. She writes about everything from motorsport races to strange little short stories, usually at 2 a.m., when she should be sleeping. When she’s not writing, you’ll probably find her watching F1, painting something half-finished, or buried in a book.
