Mother Ocean by Cindy Pereira

Despite the debris that the ocean had hauled up all around, the beach felt therapeutic under her toes.

Across the aqua-blue expanse, the horizon was ablaze with the setting sun, and seagulls called over the eternal rush of the waves. Sometimes, the tidal foam touched her feet and receded, and the shoreline appeared to slide backwards.

She hated the unending expanse before her now. Like a shimmering leviathan rumbling within its belly, sometimes screaming, sometimes dreaming, but never silent, never still, it tossed and churned in waves of guilt. Out there, over that darkening line, she had lost everything, snatched to the depths by the force of this fiend.

Beyond the shoreline, where the town was winking ablaze with a million lights under the night sky, two children waited, bug-eyed and hungry. Children orphaned twice now – once when that shapeless expanse had snatched their father away, and now, when they lost the young man who had stepped in to take his place.

“You sure you want to go, Mick?” she had asked him for the hundredth time that day. “I heard the forecast is not too good.”

“If I don’t go, I don’t get paid,” he had replied. “And if I don’t get paid, we don’t eat.”

Mick had always loved the ocean. He’d speak of the vast blue swell like it was a real person, a mother with a heart of gold heaving within her wide bosom.

So, he left in his yellow oilskins, hauling his bag over his shoulder and kissing the little ones and her goodbye.

It was a week today, and they had finally called off searching the rumbling ocean. They had come to her door, like they had done for the others, sliding their hats off and shaking their heads in silence. Numb and robbed, she had left the little ones to wander the shore and look upon her shifting nemesis for a while.

All at once, there was darkness. The fire on the horizon had gone, leaving only a red remnant upon the sky where the sun had struggled seconds ago. She gasped at the blackness, broken only by the flashes of the waves; like frills on a gigantic mother’s cap, they rolled and fragmented to lace upon the beach.

Mick had gone, like that setting sun, extinguished by the ocean. Nothing remained except a tagline here and a mast there, a mute testimony to the unflinching fury of the seas. He had been all she had, but for the two little ones, now bewildered in their cribs, awaiting her return. He had been a part of her, emerging from her womb through sweat and tears. She had sighed in relief and had laughed with joy at his first lusty cry.

The forbidding ocean raced to touch her feet and shrank back, almost guilty of maternal treason. Heaving like a mighty mother, it moaned a lullaby for her own boy, now buried deep within that watery tomb.

Cindy Pereira, born and raised in Bangalore, India, prefers to be called a storyteller rather than a writer. Her love for making up stories began at a very young age when her dolls became the actors for scripts written in her mind. Some of her stories spark from life events, and some are just yarns. She enjoys working through the nitty-gritties of building up a long story just as much as she jumps to the challenge of writing flash fiction and poetry. Cindy loves to trek, run and ‘catch the sun, and lives with her husband in Bangalore.

Photo credit at www.dreamstime.com

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