Personal Silence

Personal Silence

Molly Gloss

He washed out the cut in a puddle of salt water. He didn’t have anything to wrap around it. He picked up the clam shovel in one hand and held onto her cut hand with the other. They started back along the beach. He could feel her pulse in the tips of her fingers. What did you dream, he wanted to say.

It had begun to be dark. There was no line dividing the sky from the sea, just a griseous smear and below in the cream-colored lines of surf. Ahead of them Jay watched something rolling in the shallow water. It came up on the beach and then rode out again. The tide was rising. Every little while the surf brought the thing in again. It was pale, a driftlog, it rolled heavily in the shallow combers. Then it wasn’t a log. Jay let down the shovel, and Mare’s hand and waded out to it. The water was cold, dark. He took the body by its wrist and dragged it up on the sand. It had been chewed on, or shattered. The legs were gone, and the eyes, the nose. He couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. He dragged it way up on the beach, on the dry sand, above the high tide line. Mare stood were he was and watched him.

He got the clam shovel and went back to the body and began to dig a hole beside it. The sand was silky, some of it slipped down and tried to fill the grave as he dug. In the darkness, maybe he was shoveling the same hole over and over. The shovel handle was sticky, from Mare’s blood on his palm. When he looked behind him, he saw Mare sitting on the sand, huddled with her thin knees, pulled up, waiting. She held her hurt hand with the other one, cradled.

Personal Silence. Illustration by Elena

When he had buried the legless body, he walked back to her and she stood up and he took her hand again and they went on along the beach in the darkness. He was cold. His wet shoes and his jeans grated with sand. The cut on Mare’s hand felt sticky, hot, where he clasped his palm against it.

She said, in a whisper, “I dreamed this, once.” He couldn’t see her face. He looked out, but he couldn’t see the water, only hear it in the black air, a ceaseless, numbing murmur. He remembered the look that had come in her face when she had first seen his boat-building. There are mines in the strait. He wondered if that was when she had dreamed this moment, this white body rolling up on the sand.

He imagined Mare dead. It wasn’t hard. He didn’t know what kind of a death she could have that could end the war, but he didn’t have any trouble seeing her dead. He had seen a lot of dead or dying children, written about them. He didn’t know why imagining Mare’s thin body, legless, buried in sand, brought up in his mouth the remembered salt taste of tears, or blood, or the sea.