Cormorant

I remember the afternoon I met her. I had wandered down to the rocky beach by the house I had moved into some months prior, in the cold and windy February. The weather was starting to warm up now, after a short and gloomy rainy season. I wasn’t brave enough to get in the water yet, it still felt chillingly cold on my feet, lapping vestiges of the winter, but as I looked out across the rippling turquoise water, I saw a woman gliding over the sparkling sea. 

She was so elegant and swift, diving down beneath the surface, only to reappear as if by magic, many metres away. When on the surface, she was so quick and precise in her movements that she seemed to fly above the water, before diving back down again. There was a big rock that jutted out of the sea a few metres from the beach, black, pitted and gnarled. It looked like it would rip hands and feet to bloody ribbons, but the woman lifted herself with ease onto the rock, and spread her arms to face the plump afternoon sun. 

What I had taken to be some kind of wetsuit now appeared to be a shimmering, sodden black cloak that draped over her arms and hung down like wings. She shook her arms and crystal droplets of briny seawater scattered out from the shimmering jet cloak, returning to the waves. She had a long neck and surprisingly craggy face. She was old indeed, yet she moved through the water with such elegance, as if she were dancing between wave and sky. She turned her head to face the shore and locked eyes with me. Her gaze was ancient and wild and pinned me to the stone on which I was sat. With a flick of her cloak she leapt from the rock and landed on the sand near me. 

I could see her more clearly now, her fierce eyes and lined skin, the giant sable cloak folded back against her body. She came and sat next to me. Unbidden, I suddenly felt my lips part and my tongue start to move. Out of me, out of the deepest hidden places inside me, bubbled my fears and hopes, flowing away from me with each ebb of the waves that caressed the beach, washing away like sea foam. She sat, this dark and ancient woman, without moving or speaking to me, just fixing me with her fierce eye until all the buried words had escaped to freedom up my throat and out of my mouth, shaped by teeth and tongue. When I was finally still and silent again, she slowly stood.

‘Wait here’, she croaked and with nothing more, leapt back into the sea. She dived headfirst under a cresting wave, reappearing a little further down the beach. She cast around and dived back under again, the same pattern I had witnessed before as she swam. The last time she was down in the jade depths much longer than before and I started to feel anxiety stroke my heart, before she rose back to the surface with something glittering and silver in her mouth. She flicked her cloak and almost seemed to fly, she was back in front of me so quickly, silvery, glittering thing proffered in her open hand. 

I took it. No longer than my thumb, it was a fish made of silver. It was exquisite, each and every scale fashioned individually and fastened together so that it undulated with the motion of a real fish, the late afternoon sun making it gleam with life. As I sat enraptured by this gift pulled from beneath the surface of the water, the veil that separates worlds, the fierce-eyed woman bent to my ear, and in low and croaking voice whispered words of wisdom that sparked and danced all the way across my eyes, down my heart, through my belly and into my feet. As she whispered the little silver fish seemed to wriggle and move in my palm in time to the waves of her words. When she had finished, she drew back and with another flick of her cloak, disappeared back into the cerulean sea.

© Elena Tornberg-Lennox 2023