#anonimouse

Dawn bled across the water in slow wounds of rose and gold. She loved this hour, the threshold, the moment before the world decided what it would be. She'd always belonged to the in-between places: the shoreline, the dusk, the breath held between a question and its answer. In the old days, her worshippers had understood this. Now she haunted the edges of a world that no longer believed in edges, a world that preferred its categories clean: day, night, real, imagined. She existed in the seams none of them remembered they had. Soon the sun would burn the mist away, and fishermen would cast their lines, and children would shriek at the cold bite of waves. Later she would have to remember how to be solid, but now she was only sensation: salt crusting along her hairline, the taste of brine on her lips, familiar as her own name, the pull of the tide cradling her like a lullaby sung in a language no one spoke any more.  

The moon still hung above the horizon, pale and retreating, dragging the water with it. She felt the tug deep in the marrow of her. The outgoing tide always made her feel thin, an unspooling and loosening of the threads that bound her to the shape she wore, as if her edges were made of seafoam - brief, beige, and easily scattered. It would be a bad day for clarity. She knew this. She'd lived enough days to know the shape of them before they arrived, like feeling the moon's phases in her bones before she saw them in the sky. The same way she knew which shells would wash up on which shores, which storms would name themselves after women and which prayers would go unanswered. Waxing meant fullness, presence, the comforting weight of her own hands. Waning meant this: the slow dissolution, the sense that if she looked down, she might see sand through her skin. She had learned long ago not to look down on waning days. She had learned long ago not to look down at all.

She closed her eyes and with the waking sun caressing her skin she let herself drift. 

--The temple steps were worn to a softness like old bone beneath her feet, sent there by pilgrims having climbed them to leave her small, carved boats whispering names for her that the sea has since swallowed. The priestess was singing, her voice thin and reedy, smoke from the incense burners curling like question marks towards the dome. The incense was frankincense and something older, a resin harvested from trees that no longer grew, that had turned to fossils in the strata of a world that had forgotten them. The priestess's hands were stained ochre to the wrists, and when she lifted them in supplication, Niamhila could see the faint tremor of devotion in her fingers. They used to shake when they saw me. She thought, the observation floating up from some deep trench of memory, not from fear, from proximity. She had been something then, something dense enough to cause trembling.

Someone pressed a carved boat in Niamhila's palm. The wood was still warm from the maker's hands, the hull etched with symbols she had taught them herself, back when she still bothered to teach. Lady of the Crossing, they whispered, guide my son home. She wanted to tell them she couldn't--

She opened her eyes. 

The temple was gone, the priestess was gone, the carved boat was gone, though her palms still curled around the phantom weight of it. She flexed her fingers beneath the water and watched them blur, bone and skin and the faint impression of something older moving beneath.

Just a memory, just a fragment re-emerging and submerging like driftwood in the riptide.  

The sky was lighter now. She could see the beach taking shape below the cliff, a pale crescent of sand. Black rocks hunched at either end like kneeling supplicants frozen mid-prayer, and on the sand a figure. Her mind registered human with the same automatic indifference it might register a seabird or a cloud. Humans came and went. They were brief, bright things flickering at the edges of her attention, like candles in a draft. But something about the stillness of this one snagged at her. It wasn't the stillness of sleep. It wasn't the stillness of meditation or contemplation. It was the stillness of someone listening, someone waiting, someone who had come to the edge of the world and expected the edge to speak back. Niamhila halted in contemplation.

Someone was there at this hour, on her beach. This stretch of coast belonged to no one. She had made certain of that, had watched the land change hands throughout wars and treaties and the slow crawl of property lines. She had ensured this one cove remained overlooked by maps and memory alike, and yet=

She drew herself towards the shallows without conscious decision, her body remembering how to move through water even as her mind remained suspended in that moment of interruption. The figure solidified: a man seated on the dry sand above the tide line, knees drawn up, arms wrapped loosely around them.  It was strange that he wasn't looking at the sunrise. Most people came to the beaches at dawn to watch the light, to photograph the colours, to perform a kind of reverence for the spectacle of it. They were looking at the space between the waves, the place where things disappeared and reappeared, the threshold.

She should leave. She knew this. Humans at dawn were either running from something or searching for something. Neither type needed a strange woman emerging from the sea with salt in her hair and centuries caught in her throat. She had learned, over the long years, to be a story that happened to other people; a figure glimpsed from a distance, a tale told later with nervous laughter. I thought I saw something. Probably just a seal? Probably just the light? 

But she didn't leave. She stood in the shallow water, lapping at her calves, and watched him watch the waves.

His stillness was unusual. Most humans fidgeted - checked phones, shifted positions, threw stones to prove they existed by the evidence of impact. This one simply existed as if he had been placed there by the same hand that had arranged the rocks and the tide pools. He wore a faded jacket, unremarkable, the kind sold in coastal towns to tourists who underestimated the wind. His hair was dark and touched by the same salt damp that clung to her own skin. There was a notebook beside him in the sand, closed, a pen resting on its cover. Whatever he had come here to record, he had stopped recording it. Whatever he had come here to find, however, he was still looking for it. She'd seen that kind of attention before - once, twice, across the centuries. It was the attention of scholars, of seekers, of those rare humans who had not come to the sea to take something from it, but to ask it a question. She had never given answers, but she had watched those questioners from a distance, and something in her had leaned toward them like a plant towards light. This man had a patience to him that felt old, though she could see he was a young human, young in decades not centuries. 

Then he looked up. 

His eyes found hers across the distance and something in Niamhila's chest, something she had thought the centuries had worn smooth, tightened like a fist remembering how to unclench.  He didn't startle. Didn't look away. Didn't reach for a phone to document the strange woman standing in the cold water at dawn, with her hair dark as kelp and her skin catching the light like wet stone. There was no fear in his face, no confusion, no scrambling for explanation. He simply met her gaze with the same quiet attention he'd been given the water, as if she were another natural phenomenon: a tide, a storm, a thing worth observing. There was a recognition, but not the kind that came from knowing her. It was the kind that came from knowing something like her was possible. The expression of a man who had spent his life looking for fairy rings and ghost lights and vanishing islands, and who would finally, on an ordinary dawn on an unremarkable beach, find something that looked back. His lips parted slightly. Not to speak. Just the involuntary motion of a question forming. Are you what I think you are?

She felt, for the first time in longer than she could measure, seen. Not worshipped, not prayed to, seen. The distinction landed somewhere deep and unmapped inside her, a place no offering had ever reached. 

The wave of a memory tried to surface: a different beach, a different pair of eyes, a name that tasted like seaweed and sorrow. She pushed it down. Not now, not when the tide was pulling her thin and the strange man on the sand was still watching her with that unbearable calm.

He raised a hand, not quite a wave, not quite a greeting either. An acknowledgement. I see you. I am not afraid. You need not be afraid. Take your time.  

Niamhila did not raise her hand in return. She was not certain she could move, but she did not look away. The water tugged at her legs, insistent, the outgoing tide reminding her of its claim even if the sky refused to make its own.

The sun broke fully over the horizon, and the world filled with light. Somewhere in the deep water behind her, something ancient and forgotten exhaled - a tide of remembering that tugged at her bones -  and began to pull her back. 

She resisted. For a moment. For a space of the prayer she no longer remembered the words to. As the water rose to her waist, then her ribs, she glanced back once. He had not moved. He was still watching, his hand still raised in that half gesture of acknowledgement, had not dropped. It hung in the air between them like an offering, like the little carved boat she used to cradle in her palms, warm from the hands of the faithful. 

She turned away. The sea closed over her shoulders. The sky watched without intervening, and when the beach was empty again, the man on the sand remained, his hand still lifted, his notebook still closed. The tide retreated drawing the water with it further and further from the shore.

The wind couldn’t decide what it wanted to be. It whipped across the green with the indecision of early spring, flirting with the warmth of a coming summer one moment, then turning sharp with the winter’s last crisp bite the next. The whole park moved with it: daffodils nodding their idiot heads, a discarded crisp packet tumbling end over end like the tiny gymnast. The new leaves on the plain tree were shivering in applause. Behind her, the painted paper brolly rocked on its prop. A central pole swayed in slow, deliberate arcs. The tip describing something against the soil - not a letter, not quite, but the intention of one. Like the flow of yùnbǐ, the wind’s thought written into the earth before it could be read. The painted peonies on the oil-paper skin trembled with each pass, their petals blurring. She did not turn to watch the pole’s calligraphy. She watched its shadow instead, the dark circle of it wobbling on the grass like something trying to remember how to be still.

The grass tickled her ankles where she sat, the blades needling up through the weave of the picnic blanket. It had been cut recently. She could smell it: that sharp, green wound smell, the scent of a mower’s slowly stroking back and forth across the morning. It was a smile that went straight to the back of the throat and poured something with it. Memories. Or the shape of them. Knee-grass memories. The sting of a graze after a tumble. The hot huff of breath through gritted teeth. The other girls circling. Their names were gone now, but she remembered their socks. White ankle socks with lace trim, all the same. A uniform of belonging. She’d worn them too, even when her mother had frowned at the cost. Tài guì le for such a little scrap of cotton. But she had wanted to match. She had wanted, with a want that had no English word, to be the same as everyone else, just for those few hours before the street lamps flickered on. And then the long walk home, the kitchen light yellow and waiting. Her mother’s voice already shaped into its familiar scold: “Look at the state of you, like a wild thing. What will the neighbours think?” Her mother always said it twice: once in English for the neighbours, once in the mother tongue for the heart.

She stretched her legs out and watched the sun make a slow study of her skin. It pooled in the dip of her collarbone, traced the fine hairs on her forearms, settled into the folds of her summer dress like a guest who had been expected once but had arrived on the wrong day. Her skin held her youth in soft waves, like the pond bō guāng lín lín. She was what, 19, 20? How old was she again? Numbers had always drifted beyond her reach, a leaf on the current of a stream she could see but not touch. It didn’t matter right now. She was young, that much was certain. The same way the sky was blue, the same way the parasol behind her was painted with painted flowers she had known the name of in her other language. Paeony. The word came in English first now. Then, after a pause, the other one arrived: Mǔdān. They didn’t quite match. One was a flower. One was a memory of a flower on a scroll in her grandmother’s flat. The paint cracked like old varnish. She wasn’t sure which anymore. Perhaps they had always been the same thing, and she’d only just noticed.

She’s sat straight or straight enough. There was a slight curve to her shoulders, a gentle rounding where the neck met the spine. At a glance, it could have been the slouch of a girl who’d spent too long bent towards a screen, scrolling through other people’s lives, or it could be something more natural, the body remembering its eventual shape. Either way, she held it without complaint. This body, this not-quite-straightness, it was hers. The wind worried at a loose thread on her sleeve, and she let it. Her eyes were bright, the way a child’s eyes are bright in the first warm week of the year. All that sun, all that green, and nowhere else to be but here. But the brightness pooled mostly in the centre at the corners, where the skin creased into little folded fans. Something else had settled. Not sadness, exactly. More like the knowledge of sadness. The way a room still holds the shape of a song after the singing has stopped. Her hair was blonde, a bronzed English blonde. The kind that darkened at the roots in winter and caught the light in summer. Today it was loose, lifting and falling with the wind’s indecision, and threaded through the bronze were paler strands, white or near-white, that caught the sun on the crown of her head. They looked like platinum highlights, the sort a young woman might pay good money for in a salon. They looked deliberate.

She was humming something, a tune that rose and fell without any particular direction, like a bee that had forgotten which flower it was looking for. It was an old tune, a kitchen tune, one her mother had hummed while she worked, sleeves rolled, hands dusted with flour. The radio was playing something in Mandarin that neither of them understood any more, but both of them felt. She didn’t remember learning it. It was simply there, stitched into the quiet, surfacing whenever her mouth had nothing else to do.

A shriek breaks her mourning. It cuts across the green. Not pain, not fear, just the high, bright sound of a child at the far edge of their own velocity, running faster than their legs could carry them. She turned her head towards it, slow as the sunflower following the light. There were children near the far trees, two or three of them chasing something she couldn’t see. Maybe a ball, maybe each other, maybe nothing at all, just the joy of movement, of lungs burning with cold spring air. She watched them and felt the ghost of a memory rise: a playground, metal bars, the particular squeak of a swing that needed oiling. That was from the secondary school, wasn’t it? The one on the hill where she’d sat on the low wall with her friends, drinking something she probably should not be drinking from a shared bottle. Their skirts rolled up at the waist to show more knee. They’d laughed about something: a boy, probably, a teacher’s unfortunate haircut. A granny had her cart set up. A pot of something bubbling, the sweet scent of maltose thickening in the air like mì táng, curling around the chip butties, drowned in vinegar and salt. The girls didn’t notice the stall that was always set up by the tarmac, where it gave way to a scrubby patch of grass the boys played footy on. They never did. But still, the smell was there, all the same, threading through their laughter like a second language.

The swing kept squeaking, but the one behind the secondary school had been missing a seat, the third from the left, and the one that remained was a chunky black rubber thing baked brittle by too many summers, crumbling at the edges where the sun had got in. This swing was whole. Its seat was a flat circle of red plastic, sun bleached to a gentle coral at its centre, and the frame stood bright in a yellow that had once been bold, the sort of yellow that belonged in a children’s drawing of the sun. The metal joints were greased. They moved without complaint. The whole thing looked cared for.

Behind it, a low fence painted in peeling stripes of pink and turquoise, colours that didn’t know English grey. Her father was there, pushing her on this red swing that was not the black swing, her voice giggling: “gāo yī diǎn, gāo yī diǎn”. His rough hands on her back. The stripes of the fence blurred as she rose and fell, pink and turquoise bleeding into the sky.

She blinked.

The children near the trees had stopped running. They were bent over something in the grass. A ladybird, perhaps, or a lost coin, or maybe a buttercup? The squeaking swing was gone, the maltose was gone, but there was smoke drifting across the green from a small huddle of figures with a portable grill. Charcoal and fat, and cumin in it. Five spice! The smell of a night market in a city she half-remembered. Or had she been there? The smoke stung her eyes. She wiped them with the back of her hand. Didn’t know if she was crying from the smoke, or from the gap between the two hungers.

The light began to change, not dramatically. There was no sudden cloud, no dimming of the sun, but something in the quality of it shifted. The green, which had been all bright openness, grew longer. The shadows of the plain trees stretched towards her across the grass like dark fingers, slow and unhurried. Her paper parasol, still swaying on its prop, cast a shadow that had grown thinner and paler, as if the day was wearing it out.

She had noticed none of this. She was still somewhere else, somewhere trapped between the vinegar-sharp chip butty and the maltose cart, between the black swing and the red one. The gap had widened into something vast and quiet, and she sat in it, her hands loose in her lap, her humming having stopped without her noticing. The children had gone; she didn’t know when they’d left. The barbecue smoke still rose from the far side of the green, but the figures around it had blurred into silhouettes. The wind had softened too, no longer whipping but stroking, a slow hand across the grass. Everything had gone gentle; even their daffodils had stopped their nodding and stood still, little yellow centuries waiting for something. The parasol’s calligraphy had stopped; the bamboo pole no longer wrote the wind’s intent into the earth. It was simply still, as if the lesson was over.

A shadow fell across her, not the long shadow of a tree, but something closer, something with weight. It pulled on the edge of her picnic blanket and then crept up over her knees, her hands, her chest until they had covered her entirely. She didn’t startle. She looked up slowly, the way you look up at something you’ve been waiting for without knowing you were waiting.

He was old, that much she could tell, even with the sun behind him making a halo of his white hair. His face was in shadow, but she could see the shape of him: a little stooped, a little narrow in the shoulders, the way men go when the years have winnowed them down. He wore a coat that seemed too heavy for the season, a wool thing in a grey that had forgotten what colour it used to be. His hands were in his pockets. He stood there looking down at her, and the silence between them was not uncomfortable. It was familiar. It had the shape of something worn smooth by repetition.

“Lovely spot,” he said. “His voice was soft, a little rasped at the edges. Reminds me of a park I knew once, years ago. There was a girl there, sat just like you are now. Pretty young thing. Had a parasol much like that one.” He nodded towards the painted paper swaying behind her.

“I asked for her hand, before I even told her my name. My friends thought I’d gone soft in the head. Laughed themselves sick.” He smiled, and the smile reached up into the creases around his eyes. “She said yes though, eventually.”

She listened. The words settled over her like the shadow had, gently, without demand. Something in the story felt close, felt warm, like a coat held open.

“Are you ready to leave, dear?” he said. “They’re waiting.” She looked at him, at the parasol, at the green, at the distant smudge of the barbecue smoke, then back at him. Something moved behind her eyes, a flicker of recognition that couldn’t quite catch, a word on the tip of the tongue that wouldn’t fall. She tilted her head, the way a child might or a bird.