Exquisite corpse by Christopher M Drew, Stephanie Hutton, Debbi Voisey, Judi Walsh, Rachael Dunlop, Emily Devane, FJ Morris, Ingrid Jendrzejewski & Diane E Tatlock
Restless Waves of Time
1.
If you were a sea turtle, you would break your bone-brittle shell into a thousand pieces and hurl them into the sky, blinking against their star-cut brightness as you crawl over the lip of a hollow nest and slide into the cold, cruel chaos of the sea, spinning over restless waves to the apex of a wind-whipped crest where you would rise, rise toward the Mother in the Sky, her scar-scratched face lit by the borrowed beauty of an unseen sun, pulling you into her embrace as the tide draws you back, and you would exist in that moment, weightless, free, caught between the push and the pull, before turning and falling again into silence, sinking beneath the blue-black until all that is left are your Mother’s tears quivering above you, smeared like spilt milk dripping from a dry, cracked breast, and there would be nothing, nothing but deeper darkness and a blind swim into the lost years with only the memory of her eye to guide you.
2.
Grandfather’s lips moved to the melody of those words as if it were the first time he had shaped them, as if telling me a secret. They are meaningless, the nonsense of plaques and tangles, the staff say. I stroke his brittle hair. His moon-covered eyes seek to find me. Tomorrow I leave this never-quite-home, escape to a higher purpose to serve my nation. I don’t tell grandfather. No need to bring the past into the present. His medals lie unseen beneath his bed, lined up like his comrades who never returned.
Driving wearily from the hospital, grandfather’s phrases follow me. Blind swimming. Lost years. Her eye. A dark history he never shared, blurted out in code now his barricades are crumbling.
I focus on the white line of the road leading me somewhere at last. It appears to glow under my headlights. I shake my head to switch thoughts, to stay alert. Tomorrow brings order, certainty, purpose. A chance to become somebody worthy of the air my grandfather inhales.
There is no particular moment in which I realise I am in an accident. As if from afar, I watch the world revolve, mesmerised. Rather than the bash, clash, crash of movies, I hear nothing but my own sigh. The car rolls down-bank, towards the river. I should move, unclasp my restraint, push against the door before there is a counter force, the strength of water. But as ever, I watch and wait. My heart slows, not quickens. Perhaps I expected this all along. It’s not unwelcome. And in that steady spin to the end, I glimpse an eye ahead of me, slowly closing its lid to sleep.
3.
The peacefulness of it almost fools me, my mind tricking out on the motion imposed on my body. I feel the pull of some liquid force, like a tide’s fingers gripping under orders of the moon. Fingers that stroke and flick my body, calling me to rest. This feels good, but I can’t let it seduce me. I have to stay alert and ready to do battle with whatever it is that brought me here. Spinning into another timeline is not something that happens often; not to people like me. If I have been called, then there is a reason. And it’s important. Some people wait their whole life and they are never called. I can’t waste this opportunity.
Exhausted from the ravages of the years that passed in a blink when I fell into the tunnel, I fight hard to resist the eye’s example and rest. If it is asleep and I am not, then I have the advantage. While it sleeps I can explore this new future world, try to fathom what links this place and the one I left behind. Find out what summoned me, and why.
I check that my knife and my pocket watch have made the journey with me intact and, with a deep breath, move forward to whatever waits.
4.
When I started on this path, I knew that I would have to surrender one of these possessions. There’s always a deal, you see, and the deal here is time or protection. I consider the options. I forfeit the watch—I have limited time to find what I need, but I will be safe from those who would do me harm. I give over my knife—I have unlimited time to search, but all the while they will be advancing snapping at my heels and worse. I can see its form, but it is out of focus. With the bright moon behind, all the edges are blurred, looking like a Polaroid snapped by someone in a rush. When I get close enough, so the light is blinding and I have to shield my eyes, I have to make my choice. I forfeit my knife. Although I am now in danger from all sides, I have time to think. And thinking is the key.
5.
I weigh up my options, thoughts turning like tumblers in a lock. Danger all around, but I have time.
Option 1: I crack the cap of the whisky bottle I’m currently holding by its slender neck. I pour a finger, no two, into the waiting heavy-bottomed glass and drink it in one wide-mouthed, open-throated gulp. I put the glass down and touch my lips with my tongue, trying to work out where between the two the taste lingers. I refill the glass, and keep going until the bottle is empty.
Option 2: I don’t.
Option 3: I use the time I have. I settle myself into the time that exists just before I make my choice. The moment is unmeasurable while I am in it, but I can stretch it, let it thin. If I can stop myself reaching the end of this moment, I will forever be about to take that drink, about to break years of hard-won sobriety. Forever but never. Always in the sweet anticipation. Always without regret.
I put the whisky bottle down on the table, take a seat facing the door, and wait for time to catch up with me.
6.
That is when the knocking begins. Soft, at first: the whispering tap of finger tips. The sound soon changes to a bony rapping of knuckles, and then an urgent palms-flat-against the door slap.
'It’s no use,' says a voice. 'No use at all!'
I press my hands against my ears, glad of the whisky burning my throat, numbing my wilder thoughts. None of this is real. Deep in my pocket, I still have the unopened letter from Ezra and the stone he gave me, the one in the shape of a crescent. I reach for it and clutch it tight. Inside, my heart is grazed but intact: I am my own private fortress.
'Go,' I say. The word comes out as a growl, my strength rebuilding stone by stone.
For a brief moment, there is quiet. In the half-light, as if guided by invisible hands, the upper bolt moves free; the lower bolt follows.
'Ezra?' I say into the night. The door opens towards me, brushing against my feet. A slice of light widens illuminating my face.
There is a figure at the door. It is too small for Ezra and, though it is human-shaped, its breathing is loud and rasping, more like a creature than a person. Though its face is in shadow, I see a hand rise to where its mouth would be.
'There is nothing,' it says, in an accent I cannot place, then it crouches low and rolls something towards me: something small and round and hard.
'From Ezra,' says the creature—in that same strange voice—before closing the door. I roll the stone in my hand. It is the size of a marble, the shape of a pear.
7.
It may seem small, insignificant, but the weight of it is more than a mountain, more than the moon spinning towards the earth, more than black stars whose weight I can never measure. This stone is silent, but whispers more to me than any words could.
He remembers.
He remembers me.
And I want to call the creature back, to send him something, to let Ezra know that I’ve heard him. I’m here, ready, but I know that door is closed to me now. So I go to the only place where our worlds seem to collide outside of time and place, where our hearts seem to fuse, where I know the stone came from. Perhaps here, I can get my message back to him. To signal to him, in some way, that I will always be holding stones for him.
With each step, pebbles displace and I sink down as I make my way to the breaking waves. The beach that is engraved into me, into our timeline, always seems the same. I bend down by the shoreline to pick up a rock for him, to send some sort of message back somehow, and there he is, impossibly: Ezra.
8.
He seems not like himself but like something celestial, other-worldly. Something that could bend gravity, something that could alter tides. As I look, he looms larger than life, stranger than fiction. Craters caused by impacts I couldn’t even imagine pock dimples in his almost smile.
The stone feels hot in my hand, its surface rough and porous. 'Ezra,' I start, wanting to say the right thing and failing. 'This is for you.'
For a moment, everything just stands still. Then, Ezra quirks his head and peers at me with those unfathomable eyes. When he moves, continents shift. The sky shudders and stars pulse.
I hold out the palm of my hand and the stone atop it gleams in the twilight. I can feel it twitch towards Ezra as if it is alive with longing. Maybe, I think, there is something in me that is metamorphic too, something that can be transformed by heat or pressure. Maybe, I think, this is how density begins to change. Maybe, I think, it’s all for the best.
When I look into Ezra’s eyes, there is a strange reflectance; when I look up to where the moon ought to be, there is nothing there.
9.
Ezra never admits that the phases of the moon affect lives. Jake knows otherwise.
The lunar calendar and tide tables covering Jake's desk show that occasionally he is able to walk from Tresco to Bryher on soggy sand. Mostly he rows his small boat over for his daily pint.
When, after one too many, Ezra had thrown him out of the hotel bar once, Jake had ended up spending the night on Samson instead of Tresco, his rowing skills being somewhat impaired. He had not been happy.
Now, during syzygy, Jake chooses to walk across the emerging causeway. The hotel will be closed. The key to Ezra's Mitsubishi 4-wheel drive, the only vehicle on Bryher, is always in the ignition though. Jake fires it up. He drives to uninhabited Samson on moonlit sand, only possible a special number of times a year. He stops, jumps out, pockets the keys. Just as the tide turns, he leaves the stranded vehicle, starts his trek back to Tresco on foot.
'Ezra'll have trouble ferrying guests to his hotel from the quay for the next couple of months,' Jake laughs. He stares up at the moon. 'Thanks, friend. I knew I could rely on you.'
10.
Here, the waves sigh over the shore with swollen white-capped breaths. They whisper:
...nothing but deeper darkness...
...past into the present...
...years that passed in a blink…
Billions of sand grains roll away like stars pulled into oblivion, drawn by a curtain of water that scurries back to sea.
...edges are blurred...
...forever but never...
...none of this is real...
A shadow appears, a darker shape in the twilight. It crests a wave and spins towards the shore, where it crawls over the lip of a hollow nest and covers its pearl-shaped eggs with slow, steady strokes.
...outside of time and place...
...everything just stands still...
...the tide turned...
There was nobody to watch. Nobody to remember.
No eyes to see.
Apart from one.
1.
If you were a sea turtle, you would break your bone-brittle shell into a thousand pieces and hurl them into the sky, blinking against their star-cut brightness as you crawl over the lip of a hollow nest and slide into the cold, cruel chaos of the sea, spinning over restless waves to the apex of a wind-whipped crest where you would rise, rise toward the Mother in the Sky, her scar-scratched face lit by the borrowed beauty of an unseen sun, pulling you into her embrace as the tide draws you back, and you would exist in that moment, weightless, free, caught between the push and the pull, before turning and falling again into silence, sinking beneath the blue-black until all that is left are your Mother’s tears quivering above you, smeared like spilt milk dripping from a dry, cracked breast, and there would be nothing, nothing but deeper darkness and a blind swim into the lost years with only the memory of her eye to guide you.
2.
Grandfather’s lips moved to the melody of those words as if it were the first time he had shaped them, as if telling me a secret. They are meaningless, the nonsense of plaques and tangles, the staff say. I stroke his brittle hair. His moon-covered eyes seek to find me. Tomorrow I leave this never-quite-home, escape to a higher purpose to serve my nation. I don’t tell grandfather. No need to bring the past into the present. His medals lie unseen beneath his bed, lined up like his comrades who never returned.
Driving wearily from the hospital, grandfather’s phrases follow me. Blind swimming. Lost years. Her eye. A dark history he never shared, blurted out in code now his barricades are crumbling.
I focus on the white line of the road leading me somewhere at last. It appears to glow under my headlights. I shake my head to switch thoughts, to stay alert. Tomorrow brings order, certainty, purpose. A chance to become somebody worthy of the air my grandfather inhales.
There is no particular moment in which I realise I am in an accident. As if from afar, I watch the world revolve, mesmerised. Rather than the bash, clash, crash of movies, I hear nothing but my own sigh. The car rolls down-bank, towards the river. I should move, unclasp my restraint, push against the door before there is a counter force, the strength of water. But as ever, I watch and wait. My heart slows, not quickens. Perhaps I expected this all along. It’s not unwelcome. And in that steady spin to the end, I glimpse an eye ahead of me, slowly closing its lid to sleep.
3.
The peacefulness of it almost fools me, my mind tricking out on the motion imposed on my body. I feel the pull of some liquid force, like a tide’s fingers gripping under orders of the moon. Fingers that stroke and flick my body, calling me to rest. This feels good, but I can’t let it seduce me. I have to stay alert and ready to do battle with whatever it is that brought me here. Spinning into another timeline is not something that happens often; not to people like me. If I have been called, then there is a reason. And it’s important. Some people wait their whole life and they are never called. I can’t waste this opportunity.
Exhausted from the ravages of the years that passed in a blink when I fell into the tunnel, I fight hard to resist the eye’s example and rest. If it is asleep and I am not, then I have the advantage. While it sleeps I can explore this new future world, try to fathom what links this place and the one I left behind. Find out what summoned me, and why.
I check that my knife and my pocket watch have made the journey with me intact and, with a deep breath, move forward to whatever waits.
4.
When I started on this path, I knew that I would have to surrender one of these possessions. There’s always a deal, you see, and the deal here is time or protection. I consider the options. I forfeit the watch—I have limited time to find what I need, but I will be safe from those who would do me harm. I give over my knife—I have unlimited time to search, but all the while they will be advancing snapping at my heels and worse. I can see its form, but it is out of focus. With the bright moon behind, all the edges are blurred, looking like a Polaroid snapped by someone in a rush. When I get close enough, so the light is blinding and I have to shield my eyes, I have to make my choice. I forfeit my knife. Although I am now in danger from all sides, I have time to think. And thinking is the key.
5.
I weigh up my options, thoughts turning like tumblers in a lock. Danger all around, but I have time.
Option 1: I crack the cap of the whisky bottle I’m currently holding by its slender neck. I pour a finger, no two, into the waiting heavy-bottomed glass and drink it in one wide-mouthed, open-throated gulp. I put the glass down and touch my lips with my tongue, trying to work out where between the two the taste lingers. I refill the glass, and keep going until the bottle is empty.
Option 2: I don’t.
Option 3: I use the time I have. I settle myself into the time that exists just before I make my choice. The moment is unmeasurable while I am in it, but I can stretch it, let it thin. If I can stop myself reaching the end of this moment, I will forever be about to take that drink, about to break years of hard-won sobriety. Forever but never. Always in the sweet anticipation. Always without regret.
I put the whisky bottle down on the table, take a seat facing the door, and wait for time to catch up with me.
6.
That is when the knocking begins. Soft, at first: the whispering tap of finger tips. The sound soon changes to a bony rapping of knuckles, and then an urgent palms-flat-against the door slap.
'It’s no use,' says a voice. 'No use at all!'
I press my hands against my ears, glad of the whisky burning my throat, numbing my wilder thoughts. None of this is real. Deep in my pocket, I still have the unopened letter from Ezra and the stone he gave me, the one in the shape of a crescent. I reach for it and clutch it tight. Inside, my heart is grazed but intact: I am my own private fortress.
'Go,' I say. The word comes out as a growl, my strength rebuilding stone by stone.
For a brief moment, there is quiet. In the half-light, as if guided by invisible hands, the upper bolt moves free; the lower bolt follows.
'Ezra?' I say into the night. The door opens towards me, brushing against my feet. A slice of light widens illuminating my face.
There is a figure at the door. It is too small for Ezra and, though it is human-shaped, its breathing is loud and rasping, more like a creature than a person. Though its face is in shadow, I see a hand rise to where its mouth would be.
'There is nothing,' it says, in an accent I cannot place, then it crouches low and rolls something towards me: something small and round and hard.
'From Ezra,' says the creature—in that same strange voice—before closing the door. I roll the stone in my hand. It is the size of a marble, the shape of a pear.
7.
It may seem small, insignificant, but the weight of it is more than a mountain, more than the moon spinning towards the earth, more than black stars whose weight I can never measure. This stone is silent, but whispers more to me than any words could.
He remembers.
He remembers me.
And I want to call the creature back, to send him something, to let Ezra know that I’ve heard him. I’m here, ready, but I know that door is closed to me now. So I go to the only place where our worlds seem to collide outside of time and place, where our hearts seem to fuse, where I know the stone came from. Perhaps here, I can get my message back to him. To signal to him, in some way, that I will always be holding stones for him.
With each step, pebbles displace and I sink down as I make my way to the breaking waves. The beach that is engraved into me, into our timeline, always seems the same. I bend down by the shoreline to pick up a rock for him, to send some sort of message back somehow, and there he is, impossibly: Ezra.
8.
He seems not like himself but like something celestial, other-worldly. Something that could bend gravity, something that could alter tides. As I look, he looms larger than life, stranger than fiction. Craters caused by impacts I couldn’t even imagine pock dimples in his almost smile.
The stone feels hot in my hand, its surface rough and porous. 'Ezra,' I start, wanting to say the right thing and failing. 'This is for you.'
For a moment, everything just stands still. Then, Ezra quirks his head and peers at me with those unfathomable eyes. When he moves, continents shift. The sky shudders and stars pulse.
I hold out the palm of my hand and the stone atop it gleams in the twilight. I can feel it twitch towards Ezra as if it is alive with longing. Maybe, I think, there is something in me that is metamorphic too, something that can be transformed by heat or pressure. Maybe, I think, this is how density begins to change. Maybe, I think, it’s all for the best.
When I look into Ezra’s eyes, there is a strange reflectance; when I look up to where the moon ought to be, there is nothing there.
9.
Ezra never admits that the phases of the moon affect lives. Jake knows otherwise.
The lunar calendar and tide tables covering Jake's desk show that occasionally he is able to walk from Tresco to Bryher on soggy sand. Mostly he rows his small boat over for his daily pint.
When, after one too many, Ezra had thrown him out of the hotel bar once, Jake had ended up spending the night on Samson instead of Tresco, his rowing skills being somewhat impaired. He had not been happy.
Now, during syzygy, Jake chooses to walk across the emerging causeway. The hotel will be closed. The key to Ezra's Mitsubishi 4-wheel drive, the only vehicle on Bryher, is always in the ignition though. Jake fires it up. He drives to uninhabited Samson on moonlit sand, only possible a special number of times a year. He stops, jumps out, pockets the keys. Just as the tide turns, he leaves the stranded vehicle, starts his trek back to Tresco on foot.
'Ezra'll have trouble ferrying guests to his hotel from the quay for the next couple of months,' Jake laughs. He stares up at the moon. 'Thanks, friend. I knew I could rely on you.'
10.
Here, the waves sigh over the shore with swollen white-capped breaths. They whisper:
...nothing but deeper darkness...
...past into the present...
...years that passed in a blink…
Billions of sand grains roll away like stars pulled into oblivion, drawn by a curtain of water that scurries back to sea.
...edges are blurred...
...forever but never...
...none of this is real...
A shadow appears, a darker shape in the twilight. It crests a wave and spins towards the shore, where it crawls over the lip of a hollow nest and covers its pearl-shaped eggs with slow, steady strokes.
...outside of time and place...
...everything just stands still...
...the tide turned...
There was nobody to watch. Nobody to remember.
No eyes to see.
Apart from one.
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Christopher M Drew is a writer from the UK. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Literary Orphans, Longleaf Review, MoonPark Review, Third Point Press, Spelk, Bath Flash Award, and others. He reads for FlashBack Fiction. You can connect with Chris on Twitter @cmdrew81, or check out his website cmdrew81.wordpress.com.
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Stephanie Hutton is a short fiction writer and clinical psychologist in the UK. Recent publications include Connotation Press, Atticus Review and Bristol Short Story Prize anthology.
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Debbi Voisey has stories online (Storgy, Litro, Ad Hoc, Paragraph Planet, National Flash Flood 2017, Ellipsis Zine and Reflex Fiction), and in print anthologies including Bath Short Story Award 2015, National Flash Fiction Day Anthology 2016, the first Ellipsis Zine print magazine, Flash Fiction Festival 2017, and Anchala Press Collection for Flash Memory published in the USA. She is currently completing her novel.
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Judi Walsh lives in the UK and writes short fiction and poetry. Her work can be found in Synaesthesia Magazine, Blue Fifth Review Broadside, Visual Verse, Bath Flash Fiction and other places. She tweets @judi_walsh.
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Rachael Dunlop is an award-winning writer of short stories and flash fiction. Her stories have appeared in various places online, including Flash Flood Journal, Every Day Fiction, Words with Jam and Synaesthesia Magazine, and in several print anthologies, including most recently the National Flash Fiction Day anthology, Sleep is a Beautiful Colour (2017) and both Stories for Homes anthologies
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Emily Devane lives and writes in Yorkshire. A former Word Factory apprentice and Northern Writers' Awards winner, her stories have been published in various anthologies. She won the Bath Flash Fiction Award in 2017 for her story 'The Hand That Wields The Priest', now nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
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FJ Morris is an award-winning writer from the UK. She’s been published in numerous publications in the UK and internationally, and shortlisted for a variety of awards. Recently, you can find her stories soaring the skies thanks to a short story vending machine in a Canadian airport, chiming away in Salomé magazine, and walking the pages of the Stories for Homes Anthology 2 for Shelter. You can also find her stories in Bare Fiction, Halo, The Fiction Desk, Popshot, National Flash Fiction Day anthologies, and many more. Find out more at freyajmorris.com or @Freya_J_Morris.
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Ingrid Jendrzejewski grew up in Vincennes, Indiana, studied creative writing at the University of Evansville, then physics at the University of Cambridge. She has been published in places like Passages North, The Los Angeles Review, The Conium Review, Jellyfish Review, and Rattle, and is editor-in-chief at FlashBack Fiction and a flash fiction editor at JMWW. When not writing, she enjoys cryptic crosswords, puzzle hunts and the game of go. Links to Ingrid’s work can be found at www.ingridj.com and she tweets @LunchOnTuesday.
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Diane E Tatlock is a writer from the UK. Retirement from lecturing, training PE teachers, as well as the fact that children have grown up, moved away and are living their own lives, has left her the freedom to pursue her own wider interests. She writes for fun and particularly enjoys the constraints, rigours and restrictions which flash fiction poses although she has had some success in the short story field as well. At home in Wiltshire, close to Stonehenge, her husband encourages her to let her imagination run freely. He is, of course, quite mad, but they like their life together in the country.
