Chalene Kuklin

1. Descent 

The divide of the horizon falls away as waves gently lap, a shivering blue that captures the mind’s eye for time on pause. The rise and fall are an age-old dance, choreographed by the wake of seafarer’s past, all to a reedy tune on the wind, the flute of all future songs. This realm of water collapses time, convening stasis and chaos, a feedback loop where the end is the beginning is the end. The loop has little effect on her, an aphotic darkness that is not quite an ocean with glittering eyes that are not quite stars, but what else is she to be described as? Feeble metaphors cannot bring to light what she is and isn’t but not much is left. These are the things that come to mind as Belgora watches the boy drown. 

His frail body sinks into the dark like snow falling in reverse. Curled around his tongue, leaking from the corners of his mouth, are unspoken wishes. They are poked and prodded by driftwood—vestiges of boats that harboured his whispered thoughts, shot down by the loudness of the world. It’s nothing unusual, most die with translucent regrets. What gives Belgora pause is the burning desire that sets the frigid waters ablaze. Looking at him, all she can see is red and smoke that starts to coat her claws. It’s a heat capable of waking the dead. 

Stay dead, boy. The world is no longer yours. 

Eyes shut tight, the boy whimpers his dissent. The ocean rolls, shimmering with refracted light and seeing stars, a hurried vortex with him at the core. Belgora is swept up in the motion, forced into a pirouette that circles the boy as a torrent of bubbles and misplaced life rushes from his mouth. He leads this dance, water dragging out his limbs for an embrace Belgora unwittingly falls into. Their touch is scorching. The dance calls for music but there is only dissonance in the way the waves crash against a distant shore. The wind steps in to remedy the song but forgotten voices are not known for their vocals.  

Belgora prods at his mind but it is a snowstorm; she can’t blink out the cold fog. So she sings a lullaby to quell the fire and frost that rage inside the boy, pulling the sounds of the ocean into tune. 

You cannot swim this. Drown, dead boy. Drown and be done with it all. 

The boy flails against her voice, his body stretched taut. Realising that choice is swiftly leaving her, Belgora bites into his flesh. Ripping his chest open, she is suddenly an inferno. The sudden flare breaks equilibrium, the water twisting itself into swift currents that rush them away. It’s a faint sensation against the agony she holds in her mouth. 

There is a moment of flight before impact as they are tossed to shore: the boy sent rolling in the sand, and Belgora in his shadow. For a second she forgets how to move, the space about the water untouched by the make of her mind. 

The boy is beginning to open his eyes but all she can think about is how foreign the taste of defeat is in her fangs. 

2. Wake 

He stands on the shoreline of a grey world that will not accommodate him any longer. Belgora watches him with a cold feeling festering inside of her—she wonders if this is fear. His shoulders slant into the invisible horizon, the tension of his sleeping form having snapped. With the snow settling, Belgora peers through the fractals of his mind: a thousand eyes for a thousand fragments of a thousand stories. 

“I died,” the boy murmurs. 

There’s so much here, sandcastles in frozen forests that run many layers deep, and a whistle that pierces the atmosphere, cutting cleanly through the snow. She passes through, all the while wondering why the ocean carried them to shore. If the boy is bleeding ink, a darkness that must be purified, then she is the purifier. 

“At least, I think I died.” 

Some of the sand has melted into seaglass, broken teacups and amber tea immortalised inside. Taken by the colours, she nearly misses the rising spire in the distance. 

“It’s—I’m missing something. There’s something missing.” 

It’s steam. 

“This can’t be real.” 

“You don’t believe that,” Belgora says, exiting the tundra. You know better. 

The boy’s head whips around, eyes growing wide as he stares back at a galaxy with glowing teeth. When he falls back, the water does not catch him. It curves around him, unnaturally so. As though an invisible force was keeping it at bay, or how some might skirt around a flame having been burnt once before… 

His voice is soft, but it shakes the beach nonetheless. “You brought me back.” 

False. She shrinks down to a solar system to look the boy in his lightlocked eyes. “You had a wish, did you not?” 

Something flickers in the green, the frost clearing for a moment. Embers, the start of a forest fire but— 

“I don’t know,” he whispers, glancing out to the water.  

Suddenly, it becomes glaringly obvious how small the boy is, an orrery to her infinity. There is almost nothing to him, nothing more than a failed lullaby and a fire that could swallow him whole—a fraction, a synecdoche of something they both don’t know.  

The boy reaches forward, grabbing what should be a handful of wet sand, but out falls dry grains. She supposes the ocean does not fancy being burnt twice. 

His fingers are thumbing the grains when the questions breathe air. “Do you think sand ever returns to the beach it came from? Does the sea give back what it steals?” 

The clouds crack open as snow begins to descend onto the beach. 

3. Reckoning 

Wet sand slips through the boy’s fingers in dry waterfalls. Belgora watches him repeat this relentlessly, with each time it refuses to stick to his palm deepening his thin frown. The ocean continues to curl around him in frothing waves, white on white with the snow dusting his hair and her darkness.  

“It’s not sticking to me,” he says plainly. “The memories.” 

Belgora questions if that is the problem at all. All lives are stories that come to an end. The pen stops running, the ink dries up. And when it does, the ocean is there to let the tale drift, untethered to the lives they lived. But this boy is a writer. He has too many stories, dreams too many things. And he is so unwilling to let them go. She flicks a grain of sand and watches it dance with the snow.  

“I remembered my wish.” 

Belgora hums, a small part of her delighting in how he shakes upon seeing her. 

“I want my mother.” 

She recalls the steam curling out from a buried kettle. 

“Your wish can be granted,” Belgora says, her voice slow as water as the boy perks up with bright eyes. “As long as you tell me about her.” 

In an instant, the green light dies as his gaze wanders. He is quiet for a while. 

“I can’t.” 

“Why not?” Belgora presses. 

“I don’t remember.” 

Liar.  

She presses her claw to his chest and sees the smoke begin to leak out from the broken skin. The boy yelps as he takes a step away from the water and stumbles further into the beach. He leaves footprints in the snow. 

“Try again.” 

He glares through the smoke. 

“She makes me tea in the summer.” 

Belgora’s claw twitches. 

“She sings me lullabies when I can’t sleep.” 

The boy is a writer. 

“She tells me stories. But fairytales scare me.” 

The boy is also a liar. 

“She’s perfect.” 

Belgora pierces him fully, hissing at the black fire that he bleeds but he is hurting so much more. The boy screams on his side, a sandless hand palming the rift in his flesh in a paltry attempt to force her out. But defeat is not a meal eaten twice. She’ll bury through snow and lay everything bare: empty teacups lined with soft poison and a rising lullaby masking the taste. 

Belgora exists as a nebula, unfocused because the dead are certain of nothing. They need a lighthouse on the same frequency as their blur if they are to fall quietly into the ocean. The problem here is that the boy burns with certainty, committing his death to a truth he does not want. He yearns for a life he didn’t get to live. 

But to die is to be true. It’s only a loop if you begin where you end. 

It’s fractals, looking up from where she is now. Through the sand and snow that she’s dug through, the memories of fixed realities and their retellings, twisted branches of frozen bark and hazy glass, she sees it. The snow is melting, seeping into the sand beneath the boy’s body. His fingers clutch the grains, and this time the water does not run.