Weekly Writing – September 21 2024

Knee-deep in the water, she looked back over her shoulder, and a wall of pitiless stares blocked her way to shore. Shining with moonlight, some few of them with tears, but for themselves, she knew, not for her. For having to live on that way, with the burden of having done something so cruel to survive.
If she tried to plow back through the tide to dry land, even those weeping would push her into the water. The train of her dress tugged towards them on every wave, like a lifeline they wouldn’t catch to save her.
She turned back to the vast horizon and her short future. A silver trail, like the train of her dress, pouring from the moon across the sea. They said there had been no moon at all before the very first maiden. That she had climbed up and become it, to tame the ruthless tides.
But the first moon-maiden had been forced out into the water, too, and so she lashed out sometimes in anger. In wrecked villages and terrible tides. So other girls, girls like her, were sent out in silver dresses to climb her train up to the moon and comfort her, and be good company to her.
The silken slope of sand down into deeper water sucked at her feet as she walked. How had they decided that more drowned girls would appease the first one they had killed? Did they imagine her to be as bloodthirsty as they were?
She had asked. She had begged. And still, they had sent her out. Now, she could only hope in the stories – that, though her body might sink, her spirit would rise, shucking its sodden dress and flesh to climb to the moon. To be caught up by the first of her kind, held in cold, loving embrace, and to beseech the first moon-maiden to raise the tides and break the village that had killed her.