WesterlyMagazine

‘Salt-finger’ by Theresa Wilks

This short story by Theresa Wilks comes from Westerly 69.2, and we’re thrilled to make it freely available for everyone to read online here on the Editor’s Desk.

Theresa Wilks is currently an Honours student studying at Edith Cowan University. Her major is Creative Writing and her thesis encompasses Gothic horror fiction writing with an Australian eco-gothic theme.

Salt-finger

Belly-foot was a gift of conciliation from the Man of the Sea. It slid sensuously down the rock face, grinding its large spiral shell past a nostril and leaving mucous trails across a mouth forever frozen in a twisted roar of defiance. With a head set at a lopsided tilt, the Woman of Stone had stood upon this shore for a thousand years, and Belly-foot, nestling under her chin, sucked its muscular flesh inwards and fastened there with an airtight seal to await the next king-tide. Alone, on this beach to the western side of what has come to be known as Australia, the Woman kept her vigil; always, with one eye to the shifting water.

Once, she had been bound to the sea floor with fishing nets. The Mycenean King had ordered it so, after tricking her into sighting her own reflection and causing her to petrify. Then he cut off her head and had her thrown into the sea, only to find that her body and head would not sink. She had metamorphosed into a volcanic pumice-stone, light, and aerated with millions of tiny gas bubbles, such that the head bobbing about on the surface could still unleash her baleful stare. The King tied her down, keeping her submerged and out of sight to ensure she could never blight the world of men again—or worse, contest his version of events.

It was Athena who persuaded the Mycenean King of the woman’s wickedness, and he had been gratified, after his murderous deed, to be rewarded and hailed hero.

When she was still flesh—before she was made monstrous—accusatory fingers had, at first, been pointed toward the Man of the Sea. For the seduction of a young girl and the subsequent acts of defilement and desecration within Athena’s temple could not go unpunished. But the goddess could not stand against another of the Pantheon gods in favour of an insignificant mortal child. So, Athena punished the girl, and was responsible for transforming, disfiguring and banishing the victim as an abomination. In doing so, Athena unwittingly bestowed great power, meant as a curse, which was subsequently wielded by what was now an enraged grown woman who could turn men to stone with a glance.

Some years after the woman had been made a monster—tricked with her own powers, turned to stone, beheaded and tied to the sea floor—the Man of the Sea had come back, unbidden and in secret. He crammed into her gaping neck microcosms of coral spawn which grew out over time, calcifying and pasting the head awkwardly back onto her body. He never looked at her face, nor did he make any attempt to free her from the nets, though he left Belly-foot attached to her face for company. She remained imprisoned down there through the ages until all earthborn memory of her was lost.

1,000 years ago, Cetus the whale was sleeping on the sea floor, close to where the Woman of Stone lay confined under nets. He woke to resume his annual migratory pilgrimage across the oceans though, as he rose in the water, something grasped his tail and he thrashed about trying to free himself, but it only made the thing grip tighter. The fishing nets, loosened with age, had risen such that the whale became entangled. In its desperation for air, Cetus dragged the nets and their contents to the surface. The boulders that held the Woman of Stone against the sea floor now pulled the ropes tight around Cetus’s tail. He dragged the Woman to the surface and continued to swim and swim across the oceans, struggling in vain against the biting ropes.

Eventually, the exhausted whale beached himself, during a thunderstorm, upon this Antipodean shore, and the Woman of Stone was thrown high up onto the sand by a large wave. As the rotting carcass of Cetus rolled gently back and forth down at the water’s edge, the pumice stone rock stood at the base of the dunes facing out to sea and back into the west from whence she had come.

She remained there for another millennia. The prevailing winds whistled through the snaking coils of her hair, and when they struck the right angles across the gaping orifice of her mouth, she would shriek, calling out to the Man of the Sea.

The remains of Cetus eventually pulled away from shore with the tides and rolled into deeper water. The arch of his rib bones became a home for molluscs and fish, and grew corals which lived and died; forming a limestone base that continued to accumulate and expand over time, until it formed a shallow reef.

All the while the woman called out into the wind, and eventually the Man of the Sea came to her. He could not get to her up on the beach, though he would reach out when the king tides raised the water level, his salt fingers foaming up the sandy incline just far enough to caress her feet. Slight movements of air brushing across her mouth and through her serpentine hair made her hiss; and Belly-foot would slide down onto the wet sand, its flesh squirming and bubbling with pleasure at its master’s touch. When the tide retreated again, Belly-foot would climb back up to the pumice stone face, fastening back onto the Woman’s chin or into one of the deep worn circles beneath her eyes.

While the tide was out, the Woman of Stone relaxed her vigil and spent hours watching the coming and goings of birds. Large petrels would hunt far out to sea, bringing squid and cuttlefish back to land to tear away at flesh; white cuttlebones littered the beach along with shells and driftwood washing in and out with the tides. There were kites that she could just perceive in her peripheral vision as they hovered and dived over the scrub at the top of the dunes, and osprey hunting for small herring out over the water. Her favourites were the little red and white plovers who ran along the water’s edge, bobbing their heads and dancing back and forth with the waves as they poked at the wet sand with pointed beaks. They would nest close to the Woman of Stone at the base of the sand dunes, their pale speckled eggs invisible, perfectly camouflaged in the sand against the sharp eyes of kites and goshawks.

Back when the Woman had first arrived, there were people from the forests who only walked these beaches at certain times of the year. They recognised the Woman was not of this place and they kept a wary distance, making sure to keep out of earshot and avoid her frightful gaze. Though, in the late summer, they did fish around the reef and made camps under the moonah and paperbark trees behind the sand dunes, where a linking chain of freshwater lakes and wetlands followed the coastline. They cooked whatever they had caught and performed ceremonies in the firelight. They left the woman to her vigil, and they had no quarrel with the sea.

Once, a ship with tall sails struck the reef in the night and sank, leaving a trail of pale dead men washed along the shoreline. There was a survivor who was found and helped by the people of the forests, with whom he lived his days out as an outsider. At first, he had been drawn to the strange woman-shaped rock on the beach. She was pale like him, but her howling cries whenever the wind changed chilled his soul and eventually, after burying the dead sailors in the sand, he retreated deep into the forests, never visiting the beach again.

Later came the four-wheel drives, diesel engines rumbling noise and vibrations through the sand layers, tearing up vegetation over the dunes, churning up the beach and crushing delicate eco-systems, including the nesting sites for plover eggs, until, after only a few years, the little birds were no longer seen running up and down the shoreline. By then, the wind had eroded some of the Woman’s features and the sound coming from her mouth became less clear. The people in the vehicles noticed her shape and misunderstood her cries. She became their landmark, a mascot, a place to meet and camp. Fires were lit across the sand as the vehicles were parked to create windbreaks for tents, and dinghies were set out in the water ready for early morning fishing. These people would sit around waiting for the sun to set and with each gust of the afternoon sea breeze they would raise their drinks, cheerfully shouting and repeating the stone woman’s cry, which they all misheard as Hey! Stay pissed.

One day, Belly-foot woke to the touch of unsalted water and retreated in terror to the top of the Woman’s head. A landscaper had removed her from the beach and transported her back behind the dunes to one of the little freshwater lakes. Although the Woman of Stone had never seen beyond the dunes along the beach, she had seen the rising smoke from the burning trees and noticed their shadowy absence in the wandering spirits of Old Ones left behind. Within a short space of time the forests and their original inhabitants had been cleared away for farming. The paperbarks and shallow wetlands were replaced with drained open space where cattle and kangaroos grazed together on foreign grasses. Now those farms, which had displaced and razed all else for only a little more than 100 years, were also disappearing, the paddocks being profitably subdivided into large sea-change blocks. With wealthy buyers increasing the local population, the area was providing a good living for the professional landscape artist.

The landscaper positioned the Woman of Stone at the centre of the lake behind her house, carving out the contours of the Woman’s face and restoring her features. Her aspect was set facing south so that she overlooked the pretty garden and back verandah of the house. The wind never blew across her face here, so she was never compelled to speak. The landscaper fitted out pipes, wires and a solar unit around the plinth upon which the stone now stood. Belly-foot had nowhere to go and could no longer hear the sea. Its seal against the rock was dislodged as pipes were wound up through the rock crevices and around the coils of hair. Lastly, a pipe was pushed through the woman’s head and out of her mouth, and fine sprinklers had been attached. The solar-powered pump sent a spray of water erupting high above the Woman’s head, refracting the sunlight and bathing her, and the whole lake, in shimmering rainbows.

Belly-foot had become completely exposed perched atop the Woman of Stone and was soon noticed by seagulls flying high above the dunes and lakes. They circled and dived, pecked and squabbled over Belly-foot, until it was pulled free by the strongest of them. The victor flew back towards the beach, the large shell rattling at the tip of its beak until it slipped free, and Belly-foot dropped through the thick canopies and twisting branches of moonah trees, the remnants of which still lined the back of the sand dunes.

Pre-dawn light highlighted white spoonbills wading among the reeds along the dark banks of the lake; a black swan bobbed in the water sending ripples across the plate-glass calm. The Woman of Stone was clad in a rising mist as the Sun appeared above the horizon, activating solar pumps and moving water up through the pipes. The fountains had frightened the wildlife at first, but later they revelled in the water spray, and the aerated lake water allowed frogs, fish and water plants to thrive as they had not done since the loss of the forest. The Woman of Stone felt fresh water running over her face, changing the light, changing her features. The landscaper, pleased with her efforts, leaned back in a deck chair while sipping morning coffee and surveying her backyard lake. She could see the Woman of Stone framed between tall doric columns installed across the back of the garden to create a scene evoking an ancient Grecian temple.

The water from the lake was fresh, but it had been seeping and acidifying through thousands of years of built-up wetland peat. The Woman could no longer see or hear the sea, and the quiet still water, with its wading birds, buzzing dragonflies and frog-song amongst the reeds, called forth in her a long-forgotten sense of internal peace. Acidic water from the fountains began to leach through her surfaces, dissolving, loosening chemical bonds. Her eternal petrified fury softened ever so slightly as the rock’s fundamental integrity began to erode.

It took some time for the Man of the Sea to notice the Woman’s absence from the beach. When he did, he became distraught and obsessed with finding her. He shifted currents, sifted the sands with swirling eddies, and had riptides pull the contents of the shore far out to sea, but there was no sign of her. He tried enticing her to come back by throwing gifts up onto the beaches—driftwood and tangles of weed mixed with the detritus of lost cargo and sunken ships. He sent waves crashing and roaring on the shore up and down the coastlines, hoping she would hear and call back to him, all to no avail. Eventually he retreated beyond the reef and, entering the doldrums, left behind a flat and melancholy sea.

Belly-foot remained hidden under the moonah canopies for several weeks before daring to slip out an eye. Cautiously, it raised the eye up as high as possible to survey its situation. Once it established that the gulls must have moved on to find food elsewhere, it set out towards the west to find its master. Thick undergrowth and the rough bark of tree roots snaked across the ground and scraped at its protective mucous linings, grating over sensitive fleshy surfaces, leaving embedded splinters and dirt. The slime trail needed to traverse the brutal terrain was quickly dehydrating Belly-foot, but it kept crawling onwards, back towards the soothing sounds of the ocean and the moist softness of salty foam.

When Belly-foot finally arrived at the beach, though, the water was flat and silent—no sign of its master. Belly-foot slid down into the water, wriggling and bubbling as it swam, soaking in the salt and flushing out grit. It found a light current that carried it out to the reef where Cetus’s encrusted rib bones and debris from the shipwreck formed a long dark cavern; there, Belly-foot attached itself wearily to the ceiling, with no intention of ever going ashore again.

Deep at the back of the cave, where the old ship’s sails hang dead, there was a shifting in the water. The Man of the Sea listlessly reached out to Belly-foot from the darkness, stroking the unyielding shell as it resolutely remained attached to the limestone rock. His salt fingers moved along Belly-foot’s smooth trail that led out towards the mouth of the cave.

Up on the beach, the water began stirring with long absent breezes. The Man of the Sea followed the residue left by Belly-foot back to the shore then, making the waters rise; he moved deep under the sand, washing through the bones of long buried sailors, and descending deeper to the limestone caverns far beneath the surface. He salted the underground aquifers, shrivelling tree roots on the way, before rising to salt the wetlands and lakes above the ground.

People began to move away from the area as the land lost value due to increasing salinity and the sulphurous stench of rotting vegetation in stagnating lakes. The pipes that brought water to the fountains corroded and melted away as if they had never been. They left new gaping holes through the Woman of Stone and the foundations of her plinth disintegrated.

She began sinking down into the lake and the ground shook violently as the Man of the Sea reached up from the aquifer beneath. He grasped her feet, pulling her down through thick mud into a swirling vortex. He dragged her through the deep limestone caverns, loosening the sand with backflow, and pulled her back past the long dead sailors who grinned and writhed with the water movement under the beach.

The Woman of Stone rose to the surface as they reached the shore, her body crumbling with the loss of lime and other chemical adhesives. The weakened coral holding her head in place cracked and broke at the water’s edge. The waves washed her ruined body into the sea, but her head remained upright on the beach facing west.

The Man of the Sea could not stand to look at her; she would not relent, and she would not turn away. He called forth the ocean, and as a wall of water heaved above the reef, the old sailing ship, caught in the up-current, rolled back onto its hull, sending its three barnacle-encrusted masts rising upwards to spear the sky. The trident—his divine emblem—proclaimed him king over the oceans; with it the Man of the Sea controlled the water and the wind. He sent squalls ahead where they whipped about the Woman of Stone’s head and she hissed until it hit the sweet spot across her lips. Then, as the tsunami barrelled towards her, she shrieked her accusation one last time.

‘Raaapisssst!’

The wind across the ocean howled through the trident masts and the Man of the Sea’s white horses hurtled down a face of breaking water and, as a massive wave erupted over the shore, he roared back an aggrieved, ‘I know.’

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