Inheritance
I’ll never live by the sea again.
We were a scavenger family, we were. Tide poolers, pickers, however you want to call it. We waited until the tide was safely out, and then we went out to bag up what the ocean left behind. Respectable as such things go.
Sometimes the things the sea spat out were valuable—glass and leavings from ships. Sometimes only fish, but we all knew by then that eating them meant a nasty death. The fish, we left for the water to take back. Once an entire chest floated in, caught on a sandbar for us to find in the morning. It were a good haul, that day. We didn’t bother with the chest, but the shirts and metal inside were worth two months of food. We emptied it as fast as we could run the contents back to the house, so that there would still be time to pick over the flats after. Before the tide came in.
We learned young to judge the time and to read the tide charts. We were drilled on how to read the hours of the sun even on a cloudy day. Misremembering the chart resulted in a missed meal at the very least. No one ever stayed on the beach or the flats once the tide turned. Worth more than your life to do that.
Once we were old enough, we were shown why. Mother showed Hiram and me the same morning—it was our birthday. A likely tide pool held one of the sea’s creatures, and she took us out to look.
No, I’ll not tell you. You don’t need to know. Oh, fine. Imagine too many openings, like gills or like eyes. You could tell it was watching you. Somehow wet-looking even though it had been marooned above water for hours. The way it moved... wrong.
Whatever you’re thinking, know that it’s worse.
I think it was trying to talk.
Not everyone can bear seeing them. Hiram vanished a few days after we’d been taken to the tide pools to see. It happens that way, sometimes. Another family, their son came home and drowned himself in a pot of water. Stuck his head under and inhaled until he couldn’t anymore.
He put salt in it first.
The rest of us got on with things. You’d go out as a family, the sky the color of lead above and the water a smudge of lead in the distance. It never mattered the time of year. The sand was always hard, cold, and somehow sharp underfoot. The flats covered a lot of ground—the bay had the largest tidal range of anywhere, so we had to work together to cover it. I remember the smell of the salt, the smell of the flats. Like mud, blood too, and rotting things. The sea stained the ground like ink wherever it could reach, and that was probably part of the reek too.
I’ll die happy if I never smell it again.
This isn’t to say that there weren’t some who craved the sea. There were sailors. “Mad as your father were,” mother used to say. The sailors all had a strange look to them. Not dead in the eye, but somehow... wrong. They were hard. Everyone on the flats learned young to avoid them. The boats would come in, up on what remained of their wheels, and you could hear the grinding clank of the motor keeping the wheels moving.
No, there weren’t any piers. No piers, no pilings. Nothing wood. Whatever those things were, they ate wood. Or some of them did, anyway. The wheels meant the boats that made it back to shore could be pulled entirely out of the water. Yes, some of the boats were wood. I told you, they were mad.
Sometimes the ships would make it up onto the beach. Sometimes the boats wouldn’t make it and get hauled back into the sea instead. Sometimes the sailors would throw down ropes, and everyone nearby would help drag the vessel up so it could be repaired.
The sailors would come down off the ships, swaying side to side. Some never stopped grinning. Some never spoke. They’d all fight if given half a chance. They brought trade, but we were all of us glad when they left again. We kept to ourselves, and they came and went.
One autumn, a ship barely made it in. Something was clinging to the back, chewing furiously at the rudder and any sailor it could drag down. None of us came near until the creature gave up and slid back under the water. The sailors took the ship the rest of the way past the tideline marker on their own.
Turning to head back to the house, I heard one of them call out.
“Miriam?”
It was like looking in a mirror. Hiram standing there, my age now, not a little boy. Lean and tall and wrapped in stained rags with that light in his eyes that all sailors had. A pair of gloves was half tucked in his pocket. They were the kind made of woven metal, so you could use a knife without cutting yourself. I didn’t know whether to run or approach but he decided for us both. His grip around me was almost too tight.
“I knew it was time to come home,” he said and walked with me back to the house.
Mother didn’t know what to do either. He hugged her as well. As the light faded and we all came in from the beach, he told us stories of where he’d been. The littles from other tide pooler families came over and gathered close, even the ones old enough to know better.
He’d stowed away, years ago, only discovered once they were out in the depths. The other sailors didn’t care. He could stay if he worked. He learned new things like how to climb a line and service the motor. How to fight. His hands were tough and looked knotted as the rope he’d learned to use.
He started to talk about the sea creatures, and Mother let him get only so far before reminding him some were too young to hear. He laughed, then, though the rough sound bore more of gulls screaming than humor. The children drew back.
We could all hear the water coming in with the dark. Mother shrugged and said it were about time to start dinner. The children slowly trickled out, heading landward of our house to reach their own.
“I can contribute,” Hiram grinned, teeth catching what little light there was. At Mother’s surprised expression, he stood and brought over his canvas bag. It was... lumpy, somehow. It had lain in the corner as he talked, and I’m not sure what I expected him to pull out of it. We’d been low on canned meat, and I suppose I’d hoped for that. He’d played with his gloves as he talked, and he put them on then.
It had too many eyes, and it came out squelching and squalling. The smell of it in the closed space... There was no air in the house with it there. Suddenly the water seemed very loud, very close. Hiram laughed again. “What do you think we all eat, out in the depths?” he asked. “You learn to like the flavor.” Hiram held it in his clenched metal fist and ignored it to watch us.
I had seen what the creatures could do, given the chance. I intended to live. “Get that out of here!” I demanded. “What’s wrong with you, bringing that on land? It belongs in the water!”
That laugh, like breaking glass. “Some things do,” he agreed. “Things like me.” He was so fast. He had my wrist in his other gloved hand before I knew it. “Things like you, too. We came from the womb together—we’re the same, you and I.” He dragged me to the door and then out into the twilight.
All the while, the creature in his hand shrieked. It was louder than the booming of the waves.
Hiram’s voice crested over it all. “You’ll see—it’s beautiful out there. You’ll thrive, as I did. You just need to get out into the deeps—you just need to feel the sea on your skin and in your lungs.”
With every step, we came closer to the water. This late into the evening, it looked like ink. The wind scoured along from the far end of the beach—what little beach was left. His grip was tight as kelp and just as impossible to undo. I tried anyway, hurled words he didn’t hear and pulled for all I was worth.
I remember the dirty churn of the water spilling around his ankles when the creature got loose and went for his face. All those openings—not gills, not eyes. Mouths.
His hand loosened for a moment and I eeled free. There was a slap of water on my calf, and half of my pant leg was torn away. How had the water come in so fast? I ran up the narrowing sand for the high tide line, Hiram’s screams behind me. The water took one of my shoes.
When I turned, twenty feet above the marker, he was knee deep in the water. One of the other things held his arms.
The little one that he’d brought for supper... it was feeding on him.
It left him air to breathe. To scream. It peeled off chunks of his skin and then started on the flesh underneath. It took an eye.
It sang the entire time.
I never looked back after that. I went to the house long enough to let Mother know that the sea hadn’t taken me too. She didn’t want to let me in, not after she saw my leg and how the sea had marked me. I was away before daybreak. In a way, I suppose the sea had taken me. I’ll never go back. I’ll never forget how it took him apart in the twilight. I’ll never forget how he sounded.
Stop asking, I’ll not tell you.
You’re as mad as your uncle were. Both of you.
Rachel Unger
Rachel is a Canadian writer living in California, where she learned that you always flip the rock sample over first to check for scorpions. When not writing, she spends way too much time riding her bicycle. Her fiction has been published in Disturbed Digest, Broadswords and Blasters, Devilfish Review, Polar Borealis, and Unfading Daydream.