Weekly Writing – June 8 2024

“Don’t touch that!” she snapped. Her voice rang out cruelly across the beach, and he looked up at her with tears shocked into his sweet brown eyes.
But at least he took his hand back from the flower he had almost touched. If that hissing black mass of thorns, one of hundreds bristling up from the waterline, could even be called a flower. Where had they all come from?
“Pretty,” he said, wavering between an apology and an appeal. Wiping wet fingers under his nose and leaving a smear of the beach’s glossy black sand behind.
“I know it is,” she said, though she knew nothing of the sort. They were horrible, rustling and reaching like the fingers of the oil-slick shimmering sea. “But it’s got thorns, see? It’ll scratch you. And some thorny flowers have poison.”
Like a promise that even the land wouldn’t be safe for long. The waves hissed and rasped as water never should have. Had the boats gotten away? Would she have been better off begging a place on one for the two of them?
The horizon was a blank, answers pressed thin and silent between the lips of sea and sky. But at least he toddled back towards her, to where thready golden grass grasped blindly at the edges of the sand, and let her scoop him up into her arms.
“’M hungry,” he murmured wetly against her neck.
“I know,” she said, and she did, to the pit of her own stomach. Inland from the beach was all wild, but they would have to go, wouldn’t they? To find whatever they could to survive. Those strange, hungry-sounding flowers had eaten any hope she might have had that they could catch crabs and light a fire and wait for some rescue more substantial than a fishing boat.
“I know,” she repeated. “We’ll go look for food. There has to be something…”
Something other than them, and less hungry than them, alive on those wind-ripped moors. There had to be. If she had doomed them both by watching those boats bob away across the waves…
She couldn’t think of that. Not with his head nestled against her neck and his chubby hands grasping at the front of her dress. There had to be something, if only because she couldn’t listen to his cries of hunger as they both starved.
“We’ll find something,” she promised him. “Just be brave a little longer.” And she tried to ignore, walking away from the beach, how the ocean’s crop seemed to laugh slyly and inevitably at her back.