THE FISHWIFE

-Tsarina
The lighthouse failed but the rocks didn’t.  When I reached the shore, it was wood chips.  To take that craft out in such waters had been suicide.  

The sky and sea were one amidst the deluge.  One sprayed up and one down; that was the difference.

I could see no survivors and could not approach the froth without being swept up and ground into dumpling filling.  Fearing the mangled corpses morning harbored, I watched.  A haze of light awakened behind the rocks.

She looked like a fishwife clad in the scales of her stock and her feet were planted upon a board, her eyes open to the sky, swallowing the rain.  It disturbed me that she didn’t move with the water. The board beneath her floated spinning in a circle drifting towards the crags, causing her to rotate like a body on the gallows, emitting a sick pearly glow.  But she didn’t move.  

I was afraid to call out to her.  Revulsion drove me--her misshapen shimmering body in the lightless mess of water sucked the blood from my brain as I watched her crash upon the rocks.  I didn’t expect her to hit the rocks.  I thought she’d float over them, and for my moment of paralysis, life was lost.  

For a moment I was relieved that I wouldn’t have to look at her swollen mass swivel in the storm.  By the time I came to my senses, there was blood and she was gone.

I don’t know where she went.  I spent all day and the next long time looking for it, even after dark, when I couldn’t see the sand beneath my feet.  Many nights I scraped myself on the teeth of the rocks that claimed the Fishwife, searching.  There’s not much to do as the guardian of the lighthouse but guard and that I had failed to do.  And my failure possessed me; I’ll admit that.

Weeks later I caught a fish, and planned on eating it.  In the midst of dinner I jerked awake, my knife embedded in my forearm, with vague memories of a night past yet so present and that was the last night I ate fish.  And blood, hot blood dripped all over me as the guilt haunted me--yes, guilt!--it was my fault and I wished so much to save her and I don’t know how I didn’t bleed out, but I cried over that fish and buried it.  I prayed over it as if it were her; I cried more... Sleep became a memory. I knew then that the Fishwife owned me, and she ceased being human.

Imagine my joy when in one of my patches of wakefulness and hunger I saw her spinning on the surface of my waters among some silver butterflies.  The storm was a twin of the first, and the wreck so complete, I saw nothing of the ship but the board beneath her feet. And I saw nothing of the chaos but the Fishwife.  My prayers had been answered, and redemption come.  

As the salt burned my eyes and water leaped down my throat and through my ears I inched closer upon the spinning woman.  Scales they were indeed, like I dreamed, slimy, rancid, pale.  I swallowed the urge to gag and moved towards her. I caught a look at her eyes and saw wet cancerous orbs of flame in a spongey face of yellow.  And then the whole sea was of flame and I was too and the butterflies became clawed wasps burying themselves in my flesh.  

I was grateful to know that the lighthouse had never failed, that I was a victim of the whims of an unearthly power.  Either that, or hell paid me an early visit; I don’t know which I preferred and which I deserved as it seemed to me that the layers of my skin and bones flayed apart.