Mercy

The coastline used to stretch out beyond the sea stacks, even at high tide. That was before the ocean had set its sights on the storied cliffside beneath our precarious village, and long before I learned the truth about her. The ocean.  

I was born with the knowledge that the sea had a taste for blood. My father named me Mercy before he took up arms and set sail for some far-off land that none of us would ever see in our lifetime. He was lost at sea, swept overboard during some terrible storm before the ship ever saw battle. I was too young to remember what happened when the others returned home and he didn’t; but as I grew up, I saw that the war haunted those men everywhere they went. It was as if they never left the battlefield at all. 

When I was ten, I begged my older brother to take me down to the shore one afternoon. I stripped off my shoes and my stockings, and let my hem drag through the wet sand as I stepped into the ocean. I marveled at the way the water rushed past my ankles, chasing after the shore—like it was hungry for more. 

The ocean spoke to me that day, for the first time. I heard her whispers in between the crashing of the waves, and with the sort of ignorance that only belongs to children, I thanked her for killing my father. I did not fear her power. The ocean spared me from having to see him chase the spirits at the bottom of a bottle or waste away and make all of us rot with him. My brother cuffed me on the ears and forbade me from ever repeating those words around our mother. I cried the whole way home and wondered why my tears tasted so much like the sea. 

Rivers can be moved and bent by human hands, just as ponds can be shaped from trickling streams, but the sea is an immovable beast. New oceans are not cut into the earth after storms, in the way that creeks form after it rains. No matter how badly sailors yearn to command the ocean, they cannot change its course. The sea answers to no mortal, but it listens when the moon beckons to it. 

No one believes me when I tell them that the moon and the ocean are in love with each other. I have seen it with my own eyes—night after night—and yet they all look at me with doubt and pity. I pity them because they cannot see the beautiful tragedy that plays out every night, right outside their windows. It is a love as unchanging as the sea and as constant as the phases of the moon. 

On nights like tonight, when the sky is clear, and the moon is full, it is easiest to see their love. The moon and the ocean may be cursed to never touch, but the moon still finds a way to drape its silver splendor across the ocean and the light dances across the undulating waves, swaying with the breeze like a lover’s sigh. 

I wonder what it must be like to be the moon—hung so high above us all, out of reach of conquerors and well-intentioned explorers. This is how I know that the moon is he. Unlike the moon, the ocean has been charted. Men have laid boundaries for her as they cut and divided her between nations, giving her new names and taking the life she gives. No matter how many ships she crushes beneath her waves or how many men she lures to watery graves, they still set sail and dream of conquering her someday. 

If the slow creep of erosion is any indication, I think she will be the one to conquer us one day. Perhaps that is why the moon pushes her tides to rise each night. From his lofty vantage point, he has seen what humans wish to do to his beloved and he is protecting her from us. It is a sobering thought to consider that the moon and the ocean may just succeed in claiming our coastline in my lifetime. There are women in our village—with their weathered faces and their fingers twisted like the gnarled branches of a tree—who still remember when you could walk out to the furthest sea stack without fear of the tide sweeping you away. 

Sometimes they join me to commune with her. They don’t pity me, not like the others do—not like those who have been spared by the sea. Instead, I see the deep well of sorrow in their eyes when they look at me. I know that they whisper about what a shame it is, what a travesty it is that the sea has been so uniquely cruel to me. They have lost fathers, brothers, and husbands, too. They know my pain. No amount of reverence has spared me from her wrath, and no amount of loss has unmoored my faith in the sea. 

I was too young to know what grieving was when the ocean claimed my father as her first victim; too angry and proud to mourn my brother when he drowned; and too foolish to know not to give my heart to a sailor like Wes. They often call me a widow on her walk when I slip out of town on nights like this. But Wes and I never married before he vanished beyond the horizon, and I know in my heart that he isn’t dead. We’re like the moon and the ocean, he and I. He is simply out of my reach. 

Wes left with hope in his eyes and a belief in his chest that he would find a better tomorrow for us. Somewhere that we could have a home that wasn’t perched on brittle rock, where we didn’t have to rely upon the sea to feed our bellies or carry our goods. He also left without any kin on this side of the soil, which left me to settle his affairs, since I was the closest thing he had to family. I refused to declare him dead because the sea didn’t tell me that she meant to take him too. He’s out there, staring up at the same moon, thinking of me. 

If Wes is dead—it is because of me. 

The other women come here to curse the sea for what she has taken, but I have only ever thanked her for protecting me. In the quiet of the night, when the moon was a sliver of light in the sky that matched the bite of my nails in my palm, I confessed that Wes meant to find a home for us in some quiet valley, far away from the sea. I am her confidant when the clouds hide the moon and the sun replaces him in the sky. When no one else is there to hear her, I listen to the whispers carried to me on the breeze. If Wes took me away from here, who would marvel at the ocean and her love for the untouchable moon? 

Perhaps this is why my tears have always tasted like the sea. With each life she plucked from my path, she was slowly pouring herself into me like I was a vessel. The ocean cannot feel, but I could—I felt everything and nothing, all the same. I know now what it means to be as unchanging as the sea, and in love with someone just out of my reach. It is an ache that is slowly eroding at my heart and like a storm brewing in my soul. I do not know what I did to be born so wondrously cursed, but it would seem that I am at the mercy of the sea.