Red Pebbles

Red Pebbles

A torn pack, a discarded knife and a few splatters of blood. Vestiges, now.

The pebbles at her back were cold and wet and in all the time that she’d been lying there, the tide had come up, foaming over her toes. She couldn’t feel them anymore. Whether that was from the cold or because…

Why did it take so long to die?

Her breath, rattling around in her lungs, seemed to be growing louder, not less.

The sky was so white, she thought she might go blind looking at it. It meant the sun was there, somewhere. The orb hid when the ash first fell a decade ago but at the height of summer, the sky became bleached and you might even feel a touch of that damned thing called hope. It hadn’t been this bright yesterday.

It must be solstice.

She hacked out a chuckle. Turned her head.

She saw the blood, her blood, dyeing the stones and mixing with the froth of broken waves.

The stone closest to her finger – she could have touched it if she remembered how – was jagged and cracked down its centre and covered in her blood. Heart-shaped. Studded with diamantes, one of them missing. A little clasp which had been broken when she’d found it.

It seemed strange that it should be here with her, at this edge of the world. She still remembered the hot, sun-scorched tarmac under her feet which peddled a hundred miles an hour beneath her. It was the only speed at which she wouldn’t get burnt. The chain was clasped in a fist which she held above her head as she ran, keeping it away from the ground which threatened to melt and swallow her whole.

Daddy!

Daddy!

She must have screamed it ten times before she realised all the adults were ignoring her. They were clustered by the patio doors at the back of the house, looking out into the garden. She lowered her hand. Her heart sank with it.

She called Daddy again and this time, he turned. Gestured her over, his expression solemn. He’d never turned that look on her before. He reserved that face for when it was something big, something grownup. She wasn’t ready to be a grownup.

The chain grew clammy in her hand and began to stain it green. The adults shifted for her as she brushed up against their legs. The patio doors were shut tight, and she thought that was odd, on a scorcher like this. The windows too were set rigid in their frames.

That the grass was white, was even stranger. Her plastic, turtle-shaped pool was filled with water today, not sand, so it couldn’t have been from that.

It’s the fucking apocalypse, boomed Barry from next door, sounding jovial and all-too shrill. Someone put hands over her ears but she frowned and shrugged them off.

Maybe volcano ash, Grandma warbled, fiddling with the crucifix at her neck. Washed over from somewhere else. Italy maybe, or that Yellowstone.

There’s no volcanoes round here, Babs. We’re landlocked, and there’s nothing on the news. Daddy sounded tired. He often did with Grandma.

She coughed. The white stuff had got inside her. She thought it was seed dispersal; she’d pretended it was fairies. Somewhere, she thought she could hear adults calling the other kids in.

Someone slapped her hard on the back, which only made her cough all the more.

The ash had filled Grandma’s lungs first and they buried her in it. Long after she’d gone, the sight of Grandma returning from her weekly church services still lingered with her. She’d be as white as a newly-formed ghost, silver tendrils on her cheeks where the tears had washed away the dust. In the end, she guessed God had heard all those prayers and finally took her back.

A couple of years later, she’d had to do the same with Daddy, though it was much harder with no one but her tiny self to drag the body. Too many food runs had done him in. As for Barry, she’d never heard from him again. He’d packed up a month into it all. Had a cabin up north. No use though, the ash would have followed him there too.

A wave crested loudly, spraying her. She looked away from the stone to glance at her chest. Breathing was getting harder now. Someone was pushing at it, laid a brick there. A tonne upon those fragile bones. Her body twitched as she tried to shrug it off. The coldness was up to her knees now. If she lay there alive much longer, it would be the water to kill her, not the blood loss. It was ironic; that had been her plan all along.

She hadn’t even had anything in her pack when the men found her. She’d intended to fill the thing with rocks and seashells so when the water took her, she wouldn’t be tempted to claw her way back. She hoped they enjoyed the matches anyway, and her last pair of untattered socks.

oh god

It was just a breath, though she had screamed it. The darkness was coming now. She could see it, a black, coiling, writhing thing, twisting at the edges of her vision. She hoped there’d be light after it. She was so damned tired of all this dark.

She turned her head, placing her eyes upon the pebbles, so that the last thing she saw would be that stolen locket, and not the gaping blackness above.