A tiny figure in a man's coat moves along the darkening sand. Wet strings whip about her face. Her boots are thick soled, too big; her feet slide about inside them. The sand creeps up their thick industrial leather like a skin rash. The zip of the shoreline opens and closes. The salt-air is spiked with something else. Is it methane? Further along the shoreline, an industrial chimney pumps out smoke the colour of bone. A lime-green glare halos the horizon. Dawn is far away. She moves awkwardly; spider-thin; black jeans. Her fur-trimmed hood is damp from the spray of the crashing waves. With one hand she grasps it under her chin. With the other, she struggles with a large rucksack. She has given up on carrying this over her shoulder. Now it smoothes a dark, lined track in the sand behind.
Concrete sky; blank sand: there are few options here. She recognises Venus overhead; some star as well. These seem to spur her on. She sets her eyes straight ahead, dragging the sack in ragged starts. She has to keep going. She has to be on time.
The tide breaks, like the smashing of white dinner plates. A wave foams over the rim of her right foot, retreats in a seething white spread. Freezing agony weighs through her sock. The other waves bare their teeth in a smirk at this. She stops. Turns to the black swell of ocean.
Her most vivid childhood memory is being lost in the zoo after dark. There were no electric lights, only terrifying noise, primal shrieks and roars. She could not see the bars and wire of the cages, only indistinct shapes, moving silent and untrustworthy in the darkness. It was the second most terrifying experience of her life.
The sea reminds her of this. She has always thought of the sea as a creature. Slave to the moon, it had ideas just the same. Like anything under oppression, revolt is never out of the question. The sea was not a thing to be trusted. It could swallow you whole, spit out the bones.
Yet it is the only open border. The only way to escape. If you pay a lot of ren, they send a man. He brings everything you need. You wait. He emerges. You have minutes. When you're ready he attaches you on to a dinghy, dives under and pulls you past the bashing waves, to the dark oil skin beyond, to a small vessel, then to a submarine or a ship. Here you are taken in and disappear.
But escape is a huge risk. The state prison is two miles from the shore. Escapees are common; security is high. Even if the sea spares you, you are at the mercy of the patrolmen on the watchtowers, the black, whirring helicopters they can summon in seconds; the yolk coloured searchlights. The eyes of the state are yellow. Like the monsters in the pages of children's picture books they glare, bodiless out of darkness.
Needles of rain thrum down. She thinks she hears thunder. Close.
YOU ARE READING
Tales of Disturbance
Science FictionA young teenage girl, haunted by the memories of her father's execution, attempts to escape a cruel regime by night. A solitary woman, abandoned by her husband, inadvertently plays into the cruel hands of 'the state'. In another totalitarian regime...
