To stretch my short fiction muscles, I’m taking part in Fictionista’s Great Substack Prompt Celebration. This month’s prompt: Your enemies have you backed against the edge of a cliff. Far below is a treacherous torrent of water. What happens next?
Part of Your World
With her eyes blindfolded, her world is as dark as the deepest sea. The coach rocks back and forth, a ship on rough currents, making her head spin and her stomach clench with dry heaves.
She has never enjoyed traveling by carriage. Five minutes into a journey, she’d make any excuse to escape her stuffy confines and walk. It’s such a fine day. I’d like to pick flowers or berries or gather nuts for our hosts. The carriage is too hot. I feel ill; the fresh air will do me good.
Only you would get seasick on solid ground, he’d tease.
Since she’d learned to walk, she preferred to move rather than sit. She loved to stretch her legs, wriggle her toes in the grass and take deep breaths of the green, pollen-scented air. Sometimes, he’d get out of the carriage and walk with her, showing her hidden paths and secret detours. They’d arrive at their hosts’ home hours after their coach, with dust on their boots and leaves in their hair, coy grins stretching their faces.
But he is not making this journey with her. Always a prince, he leaves the dirty work to those below him.
The transport wagon rolls to a halt. Rough, strange hands grab her arms, drag her out, and she stumbles and falls, sharp gravel cutting into her palms. She cries out, not from pain, but from recognition: She knows this sting of salt in the wind, the vibration of thundering waves, the grieving keen of the gulls.
The sea cliffs. Her beginning, and now her end.
The men drag her to her feet, pull her to the cliff’s edge as a dark voice reads her sentence again. She knows it by heart now. Found guilty of the practice of witchcraft and sentenced to death.
“I am not a witch,” she told the court. She swore on the Bible, which she didn’t believe in, and in her heart, where she kept her old faith locked away. Not a witch. She knew witches; in her past life, she had made a deal with one. If she had such power, she would not be trapped now.
I am not a witch.
Her plea was only one small voice among many much louder.
I’ve seen her talking to the birds and crabs on the beach, and afterward our catch was not what it should have been and the gulls stole all our good fish.
I saw her at the lighthouse. That same night, during a terrible storm, the king’s ship crashed on the rocks and everyone aboard died.
She used her voice to bewitch me, so I would marry her and make her my queen. Then she sacrificed our children to the devil before they could be born.
It’s not true, she insisted, and yet, the stories weren’t entirely lies either.
She only talked to the birds and the crabs when she missed her old home, and they didn’t talk about fish.
She’d gone to the lighthouse to pray to whatever sea gods might be listening that her father-in-law’s vessel would return home safely.
And she hadn’t meant to lose the children, those tadpoles who died legless in her belly. Grieving, she sang to comfort him and herself, but his suspicion grew when children would not.
He wove his distrust with the whispered rumors into a net and she swam right in, guileless and gill-less. He attended court every day and even visited her in jail once. She mistook his attention for love, a promise, tugging like a fishhook, dragging her through the trial.
It was only after she refused to confess and her sentence was announced that she realized he’d only been keeping up appearances: the dutiful young king mourning his fallen bride.
“I’m not a witch. You know I am not,” she pleaded as they led her away. “Please, tell them the truth.”
His eyes were flat as a dead calm sea. No wind to sail her home.
Instead, at the edge of this cliff on the edge of her adopted world, her jailors shove her toward the precipice. Rancid breath hisses in her ear — “Confess!” — before her blindfold is torn away, pulling her hair with it. She gasps, the lie ready on her tongue.
Her life flashes before her eyes, white waves, livid water. The sea. Her life, the sea.
What she would give for one last taste of salt on her tongue and cold water through her parched gills. To feel her body, weightless, unburdened by gravity, cradled by the currents. In this moment, she’d trade her voice, her marriage, the past year, her coveted sturdy legs for a single shimmering fin again, powerful enough to propel her across the seven seas. No more nets or hooks. No more false promises. Nothing to keep her on the ground.
Does she remember how to swim?
Only one way to find out.
She would not let them push her. Arms raised to the skies, she dives, clears the rocks, disappears into her old, familiar world, a flash of silver foam in the deep blue sea.
Wow! I really felt the tension and emotion in this story. I liked how you built up the intrigue about the character and her background right from the beginning. Nice work.
Wow, that was really good. Very intense and I could picture it all very well.