Salt
Dr. Jacinth Browne-Howard, holding a stack of books while facing the sea.
Photo by Jannah Browne
They’d asked him to take care of her.
He took care of her alright. Damian spluttered as another rush of milk foam slammed into his half-open mouth. The blue current slapped him repeatedly against the dark shore, floundering. Each time, he ran toward the onslaught of waves, fishing frantically, in hopes that he would find her.
Five minutes had elapsed since she’d disappeared beneath the waves. She’d taken a single plunge backward into the briny deep, like a baptism. She’d stood not far from the shore, her white cotton skirt billowing on the still cerulean. Her dark cloud of hair now clinging to her back. Her face gleamed in the setting sun, and he couldn’t tell if she was soaked or crying.
Damian had followed her here, to see if she really believed that one girl could change everything on birthright alone. He’d considered calling out to her but the time for that had passed. He hadn’t called her when her eyes were shut, when he could see her, when he could save her. A roaring wave bowled him into the wild spray, matting his auburn curls against his flushed face. He coughed hard as if to heave the desperation in his chest. It would not wash away. The only thing that was certain is that Soleil was gone.
“Like all who live on small islands, I will always be remembering the sea, being cognizant of her presence, view –”
“Talking to yourself again?” Damian resisted the urge to clear his throat and add some bass to his voice.
Soleil sat still on the glimmering obsidian earth, her knees drawn up to her chest, her fists balled up so tight that they glistened. She was hunched over so far that her tie-dyed shirt looked like a tourism billboard with YURUMEIN in large black print across the back. Her shorts creased so far up the length of her legs he knew that she’d just come down here from home. He knew because he’d been watching her. When she suddenly opened her eyes, his breath hitched. Her round lips were pressed into a tight line. He noticed her toes arranging themselves in their charcoal burrow before she spoke.
“Wa you want now? Don’t act like you ain’t meet me here minding my business. I ain’t trouble you.”
“Just making sure you not going mad.” He replied.
“Damian, come out my face.” She grumbled, before continuing to recite, like an incantation. Damian cocked his head and then slumped down beside her in the warm black sand. The ocean rolled up gently, just in front of them, then returned to its belly.
He knew what this was. He knew this poem by heart, but he would never tell her. Sure, he had to get his AI to feed him the entire text after entering via voice, the few random lines he picked up, but now he would never forget Frank Collymore’s “Hymn to the Sea”.
Two fishing boats drifted up to the shore and the silhouettes climbed out of them slowly and sagging. The way they hefted their chipped white buckets over their shoulders and dragged their crocus bags of implements behind them, both Damian and Soleil knew that they’d caught nothing. Again.
The water rolled up another time in quiet apology. The sun burned orange against the wispy clouds drifting across the cobalt expanse. They’d all been taught to read the signs.
These days, secondary schools had become rigorous STEM research centres. What started as Disaster Preparedness sessions carried out by the National Emergency Organization sixty years ago had become an entire curriculum on volcanoes to soothe a temperamental Soufrière and on hurricanes to address the ocean’s personal vendetta. He wanted to ask her if she sensed another storm coming, if she saw cumulonimbus like he did, if she wanted to read the sky with him. For she only came down to the sea with whispers when she anticipated something. But he didn’t want to stoke any more of her ire.
“Nobody reads poetry anymore.” He finally exhaled. Collymore’s poetry was more than a century old. He pretended not to know why she insisted on keeping a library in the dusty corner of her tiny, walled house. Nobody read physical books anymore. Why would they, when they could dial in and access any information they wanted from an online source like Generative?
Soleil sucked her teeth long and hard. “And you think that help us at all? You all memory so bad now. No imagination.”
Damian’s lips quirked in response. Nobody sucked their teeth much anymore. It wasn’t something that the AI interface understood via voice input and so it died a natural death. The action reminded him of his mother, Skeeter. When almost half the population had been driven overseas by hurricanes, she had returned. Skeeter was used to confused expressions when her irritated kissed teeth and aggressive dialect seemed mismatched with her sallow skin and her dirty blonde curls. As the island’s Global Coalition ambassador, Skeeter, as Damian saw it, had an unnecessary preoccupation with summoning the West African somewhere in her blood to reconnect with her place of birth. Never mind that she’d been away so long that she depended on AI-fed trivia.
“Mommy used to tell stories from she head.” Soleil lured him out of his thoughts, tapping the mass of tightly wound curls sitting on her crown. “She teach me this poem from memory. She custom learn up a whole long poem for Christmas programme at church.”
A recitation.
He remembered that. He clung to Soleil’s stories as if they were low hanging, succulent Julie mangoes. She was his only source of what things used to be before the country became a colony of the Global Coalition ten years ago, before skyscrapers and Virtual Reality devices occluded the capital, before her mother, Verita disappeared.
He saw her trembling efforts to keep Verita. She kept Verita’s books, learned all the poems, dances, and folk songs she loved. She kept the whalebone ornament, inherited from her maternal grandfather who was a whaler. If Soleil simply uploaded all this information to Generative, she wouldn’t have to work so hard to remember it. She could access it whenever she liked, she would have unlimited contact with her mother.
“Just download Generative and upload all your stuff there.” He ventured. “Then you wouldn’t have to come down here and talk to the sea.”
Soleil’s head whipped around so fast; he heard her neck crack. He pressed on anyway.
“There’s a journal app, just tell them your thoughts and they’ll be recorded forever, like you want. It would be almost as if she –”
She rose, a surging shadow, glowering. The rust-coloured tinge unfurling across the horizon signalled the disappearing sun. Damian didn’t know what shocked him more, the inordinate eclipse of her presence or the sudden rage of the sea. The warm water gushed over his torso pushing him into the wet soil then retreated to a building irruption. Despite the torrential lapping at her calves, Soleil stood at full height, unmoved.
“Don’t talk about my mother.”
With that, she stormed up the shore.
After he’d recovered from his trance, he chased her as he always did. She was out of sight, but he knew where she was headed. He strode past the scampering, half-naked children at the standpipes, past the narrow winding Owia road, lined by modest, walled houses on each side. When he got to her house, he battled silently with his words. But when the door swung open, so did his mouth.
“I’m sorry –”
“Go home.”
“Can I come in?”
“Daddy not here.”
After all these years, they still couldn’t hear each other. Soleil refused to budge. She was the only girl he could look straight in the eye, and he regretted for the hundredth time that he couldn’t intimidate a girl who rivalled him in height. A pity that she didn’t take after her tiny mother. In fact, aside from their high cheekbones and thick hair, the two hardly looked related.
“Please Soleil. The last bus gone already.” Though her eyes were steely, she hadn’t slammed the door, yet.
She repeated what they already knew.
Her father, Barba Green the fisherman, was not at home. Every Friday he’d go to another fishing village on the other side of the island to stay at his sister’s house until Tuesday. There, he sold fish at the Fishing Complex. He’d go out on the water with his buddies in the day then drink with them at night. Barba Green used to pave roads and work for an asphalt company. Fishing used to be a hobby he did to spend time with his daughter. Now that her mother was gone, fishing was the excuse he used to be away from her.
Damian could only be so brazen because Barba Green wasn’t home. He feared the strapping giant and stammered in his presence. The man warned Damian to look out for his daughter if he wanted to live. Thinking about this made him shudder but his desire to orbit a blazing star like Soleil outweighed that.
“I will tell mommy I needed help with Chemistry, and I missed the bus.” He smiled so wide that his coffee eyes vanished. A scoff in response was good enough. Soleil rescinded her power and stepped back from the door frame.
“Yuh not cute.” Perhaps he imagined the smile in her voice. He stepped inside and leaned so close; he could still smell the salt on her. He pulled back before it could make him drunk and shut the door behind him.
The following day brought its sun and in the sweltering heat, Soleil tended seedlings. The Chemistry project wasn’t exactly a lie. As the two best scorers in the class, partnering for their Planning and Design assignment made sense. They’d finish their assessments with flourish before dealing the regional examination a definitive blow. Soleil chose Garden Chemistry and Damian compromised. He did not have a green thumb, and he did not want to spend eight weeks growing tomatoes. Sol on the other hand, was magic.
She shaped the mulch with her bare hands and forced her knees into the warming soil. Along with her mother’s second name Nubuwa, Soleil inherited the ability to swim like a fish and this: her love of dirt.
“Damian, I asked you to water these so long.” The edge in her voice made him fumble to put his phone away. With a brief nod, he dashed to the kitchen tap which coughed, spluttered and produced nothing.
Soon enough, Damian came back to the garden with a jug filled to the brim. He propped the plastic container on the flat wall of a towering edifice beside him and wiped the sweat from his brow before he sat down. “You know we could just do a simulation right? Sol, why we have to plant actual tomatoes for a plan and design experiment?”
She scowled, slapping the earth with enough force to summon a volcano. “Damian. You think you could eat a simulation? You think that go taste good?”
“At the very least, we could put in the data we need to finish drafting it and I could submit it right now. You don’t have to do everything like how it was eighty years ago.” He wrinkled his round nose and sniffed. She did not answer him. She rose to her feet and stomped over to where he sat.
“Have some respect.” She tapped on the wall. “The one tribute we have to a national hero in this country and you putting yuh coutrements pan it like a kitchen counter?”
Her fingers grasped the belly of the jug and squeezed so hard he was surprised that it didn’t burst. He bristled and cursed himself for his inattentiveness. She’d been so capricious lately. He looked at the obelisk for the first time. The tribute to the paramount chief who’d rescued the island centuries ago had aged significantly. Skeeter had told him about it. She was from Dorsetshire Hill after all, the birthplace of Chatoyer’s victory against the French and of a nation. He furrowed his brow with sudden realization. “Sol, how this get up here? It supposed to be in Dorsetshire Hill.”
The scowl on Soleil’s face appeared permanent. “Yeah... but the last hurricane pull it up. And with all the construction in town, you really think it woulda last? They already damage the rock art in Sharpes and the petroglyph in Indian Bay, building hotel. It had to move lest them mash up that too. Nobody does come up so far again. That’s how it end up here.”
He was about to argue that the monument had found no more refuge in a fishing village by the sea, much more on a cliff but he knew that that would only make matters worse. It surprised him that its migration was such a little-known fact. Skeeter always talked about how much work the people put into preserving their history and heritage. On Generative, the nation was known as a beautiful and prosperous paradise. Despite the wounding winds, the people always put themselves back together, eventually. The donations from the Global Coalition should have helped, but the skeletons littering the mountainous villages where houses once stood told a different story.
Soleil’s shoulders slumped. He kept his mouth shut this time. But when a sudden cascade of water hit him, he let out a howl. Soleil shook her head as she emptied the last of the jug in the grass. “Why you bring salt water to put on my tomatoes?”
Damian should have kept his mouth shut but he didn’t. He had to ask Mr. Adams during evening classes why nobody knew about the monument’s migration. Soleil sat behind him that day, but her eyes burrowed so deeply into his back that he squirmed.
Mr. Adams was hardly forty but already a greying man. “It’s a relic. You notice we do not teach the humanities anymore. It’s useless with this uptick of natural disasters to focus on anything but preparation.”
“My mommy say the hurricanes only start up so much ten years ago.” Gerald, a smaller fifth former piped up. He came from Soleil’s village too.
“Well, they’d already picked up and become more sporadic but yes the likelihood has tripled since.” Mr. Adams said, pragmatic as always.
“Yeah, but she say it had a woman from over the river who used to tell story. She have a book about how the sea vex because we give up our land that Chatoyer fight for. She was on TV all thing. One time, everybody in the village been running up and down cause hurricane was coming. She and she husband had a big fight, they say she went out in a boat. To look for what I don’t know. Nobody know. All we know is she never come back. And the hurricane never come. But every year after that it come back full force, and block off the tunnel and wash way rocks by the heritage site up Black Point.” Gerald held everyone rapt.
“So basically, you’re saying we realized that stories were nonsense, and we needed to deal with real problems using science.” Said Rhesa. She swiped at her Jheri curls and smacked her gum.
“It’s not nonsense.” Came Soleil’s calm reply.
“Well, you know what is nonsense?” Rhesa fumed as if she had waited a while for this chance. “You and Damian lock up inna house at night. Gerry mommy see you all yesterday. Wait ‘til your daddy find out.”
Damian’s face flushed as he struggled to find words to come to Sol’s defence.
Mr. Adams tried in vain to quell the scathing jealousy before it could explode. Soleil rose abruptly from her seat. Rhesa flinched, but Sol did not spare her a single look. She merely swept out of the room.
Mr. Adams turned to Damian, both aghast, then said. “Please take care of this, Mr. Scott.”
Soleil was never the type to waste time. He knew that she’d go home. He knew that every second she spent swimming or gardening, studying or reciting was precious, focused art. That’s how he convinced himself that she must care for him, considering the time they spent together. He’d always been faster, more results oriented, but he knew from the moment he’d missed the four thirty bus that he might lose his opportunity to catch her. When he chanced another van to take him all the way to the northern tip of the island, he sat with his heart in his hands. The still, warm air and the blanketed sky made him swear that he was in hell. When he finally got to Owia, he could see the obelisk through the van window, tilting, leaning so far out, he was sure it would topple into the ocean, swallowed up, like everything he was learning to love. When he disembarked the vehicle, he rushed past the leaning monument and past the slowly wilting tomato seedlings. He aimed for the yawning mouth of the sea.
She didn’t see him; her eyes were closed. Damian felt as if his heart had burst, and the blood was filling up his lungs. He opened his mouth the moment she fell backwards, swallowed up by the waves. It was so sudden, like a rip tide, it looked so deliberate, so beautiful. Like falling into the arms of a friend. Everything Soleil did was beautiful.
The ocean coughed up Damian for the umpteenth time. He lay on the dark sand and looked up at the incoming night with nothing to offer but his empty hands. The tilting monument on the cliff seemed to mock him, another portion of nature colluding against his rescue mission. For the first time in his life, he did not want to ever remember the sea. Then it came, a downpour of rain. A sudden torrent. It smelt of salt.
