Aoife and the Spirit of the Sea
Part 2
The time arrives and Aoife boards the ship, all eyes on her, hope they get used to me soon, she thinks. Men get to work and they sail away. The next few days are spent working and learning the job. The plan is to reach warmer waters plentiful of fish in a week or two. She enjoys the hard work, maintaining the ship clean, learning how to sail. At times there are squabbles between the men, but it is generally peaceful aboard.
The men drink themselves into a heavy sleep after the long days, which gives her a chance to sneak out and get in and out of drag. To kill time, they exchange folk stories and sing old tunes, which Aoife quietly sings to herself as she admires the ever-changing range of colours as the days go by: green, orange, red, pink, blue, black, silver. She takes stock of the different sea creatures. Fish of all colours, shapes, lengths and names: wrasses, turbots, gurnards, pollacks.
One day she hears tumult above deck and comes out to see what the racket is all about, to find the men glancing at a large portion of sea that has become solid. Dark crystallised water arches above the surface and forms an island nearly as big as the ship itself. Water sprays from the very top, causing uproar. Somebody shouts ‘whale!’ and ‘a bloody big one at that’. She has never seen a whale before, but has heard stories about huge terrifying sea creatures devouring entire ships in one gulp. She is not afraid. As quick as it has emerged, the whale submerges and swims away.
The rest of the day all talk is about the biggest whale that anyone has ever seen. ‘Sea witch!’, ‘fish demon!’, chats about evil Sirens using their charms to tempt men to a horrible death. ‘They need a vehicle’, one goes, ‘Fish as big as an island to travel faster and farther to find more victims. God protects us!’, ‘I hear the whale itself can turn into a wicked beautiful woman and no man can resist her charms’, another shouts, ‘All witches must burn, land or sea ones!’. Aoife listens quietly, secretly feeling a forbidden sympathy for the Fish-demon-island-creature. The First mate dissolves the talks and sends the men back to work.
The next few days they spot the whale in the distance occasionally and the men are nervous. One night, Aoife sneaks out to wash off the coal off her face and hears a distant splatter. She turns around to distinguish a dark feminine silhouette walking towards her against the full moon. She suppresses a scream and falls down backwards, looking up in terror and awe. The silhouette gets close enough for the Moon to rid it of its protective shadowy veil, revealing the most beautiful woman that she has ever seen. Dark glowing skin and new moon hair, casting majesty and stillness.
The lady smiles and Aoife gasps — Her, trembling, dirty-clothed, pale, shaved head, the lady, naked, skin as gold, celestial, limbs as long as frozen time. She helps Aoife up.
‘A-are you the whale-witch that the men talk about?’, she stutters.
The lady laughs a shooting star, ‘yes, I suppose I am’, she speaks gently, sighing out the words, ‘but don’t worry, I don’t eat men. They taste terrible’, she jokes.
Aoife chuckles nervously, ‘If the men see you, they will hunt you down’.
‘I appreciate the warning. But I needed to meet the beautiful woman disguised as a man that sings to the waves’, she says, ‘I have seen you watching the sea colours change, you see poetry in the world the way that I do. But why be in this ragged ship and only yearn the sea from afar?’
‘I am here because I was a recluse and I needed to find my freedom.’, she pauses ‘I’d wish to join you and explore the sea. But I cannot breathe underwater, do I’, she chuckles, all sarcasm and frustration.
Oh, is this the only issue?, whale-lady laughs, yes, I am only human am I not. Whale-lady smiles and kisses her. They lay together under the stars until sunrise.
Aoife wakes up with a start and with a strange pounding warmth threatening to break through her skin from the depths of her chest, was it all a dream? The men are getting to work. She gets on with it too. The thumping in her center burns hotter as the day goes by. And something else is going on: whilst the men seemed to have gotten used to her strangeness fairly quickly, she now feels inquisitive looks.
They are unwrapping the sails when the burning becomes unbearable. The men have stopped working to stare at her with puzzled looks. She excuses herself and leaves panting. She finds a bucket of water to freshen up, thinking it might help. She sees her own reflection and gasps: she has sweated the coal off, revealing an astonishing change. Blue-green eyes fiercely glowing like luminescent deep water creatures, freckles visibly travelling her face like sea undercurrents, burning chest turning translucent like crystal water.
The men stomp towards her, ‘You are one of them witches!’ one says, ‘You must drown!’.They grab her and she screams and struggles as they hang her upside-down to dunk her head-first into the sea. Head underwater, hearing the men cheering and chanting above, she desperately holds her breath, grabbing life with both hands, ‘I don’t want to die!’, she cries, ‘There’s too much to see, I am just getting started!’. She cannot hold her breath any longer and finally lets go.
And then the unthinkable happens: she can breathe! And the burning in her chest eases off with every breath! Her skin is changing and acquiring the softness of the water. She slips out of restraints and clothes and floats down towards the bottom of the sea, shining through with luminescent freckles and eyes a bright star splitting the darkness like a needle. Deep in meditation, she feels her consciousness dance to the silent beat of the underwater world.
She sinks down for an eternity, the underwater darkness, a welcoming womb. In a trance, she vaguely perceives a glowing shadow swimming towards her. A dark small webbed hand gently grabs her arm and stops the fall, taking her out of her stupor. Whale-lady smiles big with fluorescent eyes and they embrace, dark hair wrapping around pale skin. Limbs intertwined in an unbreakable bond, they merge into one. She can feel themselves growing in volume and number. Only being able to hear her own consciousness at first, she is now two, no, three, no, hundreds… Thousands of voices floating inside the big whale’s stream of consciousness, now united to swim the seas as a collective one, who are they? she asks, they are like you and like me, Whale-lady answers. They also wanted to be free from a world that wouldn’t have them as they were, yet used their beauty and souls to satisfy mundane needs. They are creatures of nature that want to peacefully exist in harmony, men and women from here and there and everywhere, united by the wish to find a better way to exist, beyond the rules of men, beyond the eye of God. Will you come with us? Aoife no longer has a mouth to formulate an answer, for she is now seafoam rushing through the immense mammal’s circuits, all of them screaming a loud YES as they swim towards the sunset.
A sunset as red as Aoife’s hair once had been.
THE END.
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