Flowers for the Sea

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  To Courtney, for teaching me that my anger is a gift

  Author’s Note

  For my readers, Flowers for the Sea contains depictions of infant harm and death, the realities of birth, and generational trauma.

  PART I: BURIED

  THE CHILDREN IMITATE RAZORFANGS and I am without yet another night’s rest.

  The swell of my belly increases with each new dawn, my joints all filled with useless fluid, hindering movement and completion of daily tasks. I abhor my present state, but termination is not an option.

  As I’ve been told to the point of biliousness, this child must be born.

  Seventeen hundred forty-three days at sea. Recollections of a life without the current in our legs is the stuff of fables and faery tales. We trade stories. The babes listen in wonder, having taken their first steps on this cursed boat, their disbelief palpable. Teens brood in mildewed corners, hissing at daylight and orders to earn their keep. The girls bleed late and we are eternally thankful to the godless depths below. We rut in anger and loneliness. And every once in a while, an affliction is cast upon we birthingfolk.

  I am the only to carry this far.

  Forty have perished for the sake of continuing our wretched lineage, their blood stained on our deck. One fetus managed to cry out before it suffocated on its own defects. The men mourned more than we, the bodies afflicted with this failure. We turned away from the sight of the young ones sending their contemporary to its watery grave.

  I took Hirat that night. And many after.

  I lost myself in the heat of his heartache, the wetness of his sorrow, the pulse of his resolution. He was one of few who hadn’t tried to dive deep. He stood at the bow of our boat greeting the orange of the sky with determination in his eyes and a faith unrivaled. Even as time ate away at the fat of his cheeks, the bulk of his chest, the baritone of his voice, he stood tall, giving the weakest of us something like hope.

  I hate him for it.

  Hope has no place on this vessel of death and disease, aimless and everlasting in its path. We’d fled the soil once it was clear the waters’ appetite for it was insatiable. Sand dunes and lowlands were not enough. Walls of stone and brick, huts of clay and blood all torn away in the teeth of the rising tides. Hills wore away. Plateaus topped. Mountain peaks mere posts in the shimmering endless road.

  I speak of this as if it were instantaneous. Gods-like in its swift retribution for our foul existence. But it wasn’t. It was achingly slow, deliberate. Hubris could not shield us from the sun’s heat, from the boldness of below-surface creatures caressing the innocent flesh of our curious young ones. We were the finest coastal traders of the continent. Sea-battling vessels, fish, fruit, and labour were our currency. We were hardbacked and hardworking. We were proud.

  And now we are dying.

  The children imitate razorfangs and I grind my teeth, sharpening mine own. Preparing.

  PART II: SEEDLING

  MY HOME WAS NOT the same as theirs, though we shared the same land.

  They called us nims. A word with hardly any meaning other than to spit upon its victim.

  It morphed, much like forked tongues who spoke it, an encapsulating slur that reduced one to shreds, to the foam of the sea we feared, to nothing but the scent of a bowel movement. My grandmother, my father’s mother, was the only to spit back. She paid for it dearly, forced to flee with her only living kin as the hate licked at her back, the fire behind her cleansing the town of our name, of our contributions to the Crown who did nothing to stop its rabid townsfolk from murdering the ones they deemed strange, a strangeness they refused to understand because of our bond with the sea. It went beyond the ships, beyond the fishermen. My family communed with the unpredictable tides, providing an insight that made our lands rich. And yet we were the only—and being the only with an unexplainable gift breeds jealousy, breeds an underlying hate fed by distance and ignorance. They deemed us blasphemers of their church, we who did not need their gods to employ our gifts. And so they dare say we had gods within us, the only logical explanation for such power and knowledge, the olid burrokeet they are.

  No one was punished. Not one soul imprisoned for the deaths of my uncles and aunt and grandfather. But we are a people who do not forget, we nims.

  This story, among others, was my lullaby at night, my warning and my comfort. From first my grandmother with the intensity of the moon’s pull, then by her son, my father as a soothing balm. My mother, an inlander who had no time for gossip, learned of these truths and held them dear, in turn holding me from the same hate they spat.

  We lived in an uneasy peace, my father still bestowing his gift to those less worthy for the sake of keeping our land ours, keeping our table and bellies full. My siblings and I were taught at home, by the land and by the sea. We played with one another, going into town only for necessities. Even then, they took opportunity to mock our skin, our hair. My sweet sister held her chin high, her smile soft and ethereal, while my brother circled our legs, finding new trinkets and slipping them in his pockets without a soul noticing.

  I was the only who dared to meet their eye. I wanted them to call me their name to my face. I wanted to unleash the fury my grandmother had sewn into the pit of me. But I found no opportunity—still haven’t—

  There was quiet.

  Until the sea spat up three nets of diseased fish. Until the summers grew longer and hotter. Until a child went missing, scales the size of dinner plates found where he was last seen.

  We were accused of wild atrocities against their nature. Copulation with sea creatures. Conjuring of storms with the snap of a finger. Death to their industry with a sigh.

  The same Crown that murdered my elders ignored the townsfolk’s call for our swinging bodies. We did not know why until my nineteenth birthday when the Royals arrived at our door, the Prince’s fingertips outstretched in offer to be his wife. My father was shocked more than I, our family having already paid the highest price. How could the Crown want what was already denied them? The Prince’s gaze was cloying, his teeth stained moss-green. I slapped his hand away and he slapped my face. I laughed and he had his bodyguard flog me in centre square.

  I bit my lip and endured, crying only once I reached my cot where my mother tended to my wounds, not the one who I yearned to claim me, the man who I’d offered my heart to.

  The Prince offered thrice more, each haughtier than the last. Before I could deny him one last time, we burned.

  And now their begrudging hope lies within me.

  I carry the weight of it in my breast, at the back of my skull, where it numbs me, drives me to the madness of the capricious sea, wishing for it to engulf me, embrace me in my final moments of land-borne breath.

  I eat in seclusion as to not anger the bellies of others.

  Unlike most other inhabitants, I arrived at the loading plank alone. I no longer had blood nor physical ties to the land we were abandoning, just the materials protecting my flesh and whatever could fit into my rucksack. My family were long dead before the waters an
d its creatures ate at our shores and our ankles. I’d shuffled along with the other defeated and frightened bodies, a stupourous yet blazing insolence holding tight the middle of me, keeping my sight ahead and my pride at bay. I felt the eyes on me, on my wounds, on the bandages I’d had to live in for three and a half months. I heard the sniffles as they breathed in the concoctions I’d mixed to protect what little skin I had left . . .

  I am convinced it was that smell which gave me passage, my oozing scars my fare to a chance at survival, the scent of near-death tickling their memories and digging at their guilt. I basked in it, fed on the shame, on the averted gazes. Hirat wasn’t the only I took, but he was the one who claimed me, the only who dared to sully his reputation for the woman who had shamed them all and exposed their greed.

  Yet the pregnancy was a measure too far. Once I began to show and the fortitude of this child was evident, I was immediately relegated to the quarters beyond the Green Room on the second level of the four-decked ship. It is secluded, stifling, maddening, yet ideal for its access to muddled sunlight and proximity to the desalination system. Hirat’s visits dwindled once he understood his presence served nothing but annoyance for me. In that, he is oversimplifying; though it vexes me that he is celebrated for this pregnancy while I am shunned, I despise everyone on this ship, including the parasite within me. Solitude isn’t what I want, it is the release of death.

  Yet I live on, surviving better than most on a diet of boiled legumes and one whole citrus per day. The grownfolk are lucky to get a slice, never mind a whole fruit. Most days, all we consume is rosehip water and a quarter citrus peel.

  The Green Room is failing.

  In the early days, it bore more fruit than we could use. Wines were made from the surplus rot, our yeast, then rice wasted to indulge in short, drunken laughter or to mourn those lost with people whose eyes we wouldn’t meet the next morn. Not until another cask of wine was broken and poured and consumed until the very wood was sucked dry.

  What few remained, mere tens from thousands are riddled with weeping sores and peeling gums, weakened bodies shambling around the only permissible parts of the boat during the daylight hours in silly hopes of avoiding certain death.

  I am left to my scars alone. No lesions. No unprovoked bleeding. Just my webworked, too-small skin, the skin aching to be peeled and begun anew. They say fire cleanses all. In this, I begrudge being spared by the first meant to cleanse my family’s history, if only for my sake. My enchanting sister, my clever brother did not deserve—I do not deserve—to be left with marks of the fire that razed my bloodline, leaving me stranded on a diseased vessel, purified from the burden of tradition and honour and vital nutrition. I know not why I am spared, I know not why I have persisted in this life when the slip of a foot, the totter of a misstep, or a prayer to gods collecting our souls at night can end it all, can release me from this burden, from the unknown future. What I do know is that the tiny itch at the back of my skull, the subtle stench of a rotted memory clawing its way back to the forefront is keeping me in line as much as the steady beat within my chest. Perhaps it is a purpose. Perhaps it is the fear. For certain, I still breathe the air of the last of us. I am insistence personified and the spite I draw is my sustenance, a weak sustenance sufficient in quieting my growing desire to perish.

  They persist in calling me nim; this iteration a denunciation that led to the violent death of my father’s mother, the heathen to the throne. A bloodline sorceress of the presumed gods within us, compelling my health to persist while theirs fails, influencing them to keep me aboard or suffer a fate much worse. It is the only explanation for me to have done what I did. But they do not face me with such accusations. While over time my skin relearned itself, the other passengers would never forget. Within the same breath of my damnation, their guilt rises like bile to burn away their self-righteousness. I never learned to commune with the sea as my father and grandmother had, the skill no more bloodborne than skin from a rock, but they do not know that and I revel in their fear and ignorance.

  There is much more than the lack of a proper diet hungry for death. Those bold creatures, the monstrosities we’d tricked and used for our pleasures, the beings we’d hunted and hanged for sport, their flesh offered to high priests for mere midday morsels, have bred with fervor, repopulating enough to vanquish us several times over, yet they have not. At least not yet. They hunt us sparingly, yet enough to strike fear of the setting sun into our antiquated instincts.

  A part of me smiles for them.

  I’m sipping my lime tea, careful not to swallow the half-inch skin skimming the bottom, and idling staring at a chunk of wood when the door to my quarters opens. I turn with some difficulty to see Borim standing stiffly at the threshold, his marble eyes filled with tears. He’d been forced to deliver whatever message awaits me and had not been happy about it. As a young one, and a halfling at that, he has no choice but to carry out his orders.

  I do not envy him.

  “Come, Borim,” I say, easing from the chair. “I have black beans for your troubles.”

  That calms him and he steps forward as I pick up my wooden bowl from the small table. I hand it to him and he sticks his dirt-caked fingers into the remainder of my meal, hungrily lapping at the bowl once all ten beans are gone.

  I wait patiently for him to stop, my right hand on my belly, the other clutching a tiny, whittled horse deep in its palm. The child hasn’t moved in ten days. I do not think about it.

  “Ket calls for you,” he says, bowl loose in his hand, eyes downcast. He expects me to lose my patience with his insolence, but I swallow back the burning in my chest and say,

  “Take me to her?”

  It is a requisition. He looks up in panic, then pride. I watch the colour of those eyes shift and swirl, no iris to tame it. I briefly wish my child the same beauty, knowing its likelihood is nonexistent. Borim is presumed to be a child of the sea, his father unknown, his mother thus long dead. He is not the only to be . . . blessed with these eyes, eyes we know nothing of yet they worship for its uniqueness, a differentiation considered beautiful in its strangeness. A blessing unafforded to the eccentricities of my own. Unreasonable anger fills my limbs, balling my hands into tight fists, as I await this impudent child’s answer. Me. Waiting for a being years my junior to accept my request. Before the urge to strike him follows through, he blinks, exactly once since he’s crossed my doorway, and says, “Yes, Iraxi, I will take you.”

  I gently tuck the horse at the left side of my sore bosom, then rise.

  We pass through the dampness of the Green Room, the humidity instantly bringing about a sheen of sweat to my sticky skin, my scarred scalp pulling tight from underneath the scarf made by my grandmother’s hands. Borim drops his head as the yearning from deep within his belly groans for the husks of dead trees and barrels of dried legumes while mine knocks into everything we pass. Borim is calmer when we reach the stairs, and truthfully, I am as well. Sunlight from above flirts with my face, but I ignore the yearning as we take the winding staircase past the sleeping quarters of the third level to the bottom of the boat, the coolest part of the beast and where useless weapons lie and the memory of livestock still crinkle the nose. Everyone is above gulping at the daylight and sea salt air with the exception of Ket, our designated physician. On land, Ket hadn’t so much as born a kitten, but she had been studying bodies and life cycles. All we knew is she knows more than we, and that counted for more than we could excuse.

  She is stooped over something of great concern when we enter the space cordoned off by a mildewing sheet. Katka, Ket’s mother, had been the one to tend to it and oversaw most other washings about the boat. She perished two moons ago and our grief has morphed into laziness.

  My laboured breathing is what catches Ket’s attention. She looks up, startled as if she’d no idea I was coming. I look to Borim, but his chest is still swollen as he meets Ket’s confused gaze.

  “I’ve brought you Iraxi,” he says, attempting to
deepen his voice. Ket smiles and I bite my tongue.

  “I see,” she says, her honey-eyed gaze floating over to me. “You may go, Borim.”

  Borim swells. “Are you—”

  “Go, boy, before I clout you the way your mother should have,” I snap.

  He deflates and slips past me before the first sniffle can be heard by my sensitive ears. I smile as I face Ket. She is no longer smiling.

  “The table. Lie supine” is all she says, though I know there’s more.

  I heave a breath, suddenly exhausted, and waddle to the smooth, wooden table. The legs creak as I hoist myself onto it, then lie back.

  “Any movement?” she asks, turning to me. She gestures to my belly and I roll my eyes, hiking up my dresses until I’m fully exposed. Underthings are pointless, a mere hindrance when the need to urinate is nearly simultaneous with the act. She tries not to cringe at the smell, but it’s hard to ignore. We all smell, but mine is aggressive in its pungency, cloying and sweet as it settles in the back of your throat. My humid quarters do not help the situation, no matter how many times I bathe.

  I grit my jaw to hide my embarrassment and say, “No.”

  “None at all?” Ket reaches for the metal cone and places it on my belly, pressing her ear to the other end. She listens for nearly three minutes before standing up straight. “Strong heartbeat, so it is alive. But you are nearing three hundred days. Movement should be frequent, bordering on nuisance.”

  “You mean, more so than everything else about this wretched state? In that case, I count my blessings,” I sneer. “May I go now?”

  Ket frowns at me, her eyebrows knitting. “No. You may not. I must fully examine you, ready you for birthing.” She turns from me and situates herself at the bottom of the table, sitting low on the short stool. “Spread your legs, Iraxi.” I do and the smell worsens. I tense as her fingers begin prodding. “You look magnificent, Iraxi!” she exclaims. “As healthy as a land dweller.” She stands. Places a gentle hand on my belly. It’s cool and clammy and a shade lighter than my own. Wet mud against a midnight sky. I meet her eyes. “Forgive me.” I nod and she enters me with two deft fingers. After a moment, she exits, but I feel no less violated. “Plug is as it should be.” She stands and turns to wash her hands in the bucket of sea water.