Turn of the Tide | ONC 2023

[10] Above and Beyond

    There was no silence to hear. There was no air to breathe. All Sally met as she crossed into the street was a deafening wall of wind and water, an assault swift and sturdy enough to whip her feet aside at any moment. All around her, torrents of ice-cold water froze her jeans to her legs, numbing them to the honed strikes of hailing rain. Lump after lump of storm debris careened towards her from the sloping street out of the village, unearthed fencing and crumbling brick walls clustered into rogue wrecking balls that tore through any trace of resistance. Minutes after setting off, Sally threw herself against the side of a house to dodge a falling tree. Her heart lived in her mouth after that.

    Sally had lived through brutal storms before. As a young child, she had spent nights squeezed into Ronan's room to make way for families who lived by the river, in case flooding conspired to sweep them away with their homes. Calls of thunder often broke through the wailing winds on rough nights, the booming bass rocking her ribcage and keeping rest at bay until the sun peeked over the horizon. The next morning, she would swallow her sadness as the radio news laid out the losses in agonising detail, her gut wrenching at the lives taken, the stories lost. 

    Such retrospective descriptions never came close to capturing the sheer power Nature wielded around her now.

    A veil of water drowned out Sally's sight, yet the blurred forms of collapsed sheds, overturned plant pots, and escaped bicycles skidded through the river of rainwater that ran around her calves. Wallowing clouds mingled with shrouds of mist to suffocate the world until its colour bled away, its shine dissolved under rushing black waters, and roaring gusts devoured every trace of its peace. Flashes of lightning caught Sally's eye again and again, yet the thrill of the thunder blasts never failed to shock her hairs to their finest edges.

    Sally did not dare to look back at the sea as she fought her way up the trail to the farm. She did not need to, as the image of the bloated waves battering the bay endured in the back of her mind, the thought of her father and brother trapped on their tiny tin vessel packaged with it. The sea around Porthdruro had given her family life for decades. She did not want to see the power it held to take that life away.

    Shivering every step of the way, Sally's sluggish mind churned up the hazy image of Flick's face to keep her going. The memory it chose came from her first encounter with the girl, leaning out over the windshield from the driver's seat, her arm extended to invite Sally to join her. Her heart fluttering at the thought, Sally turned to anticipate the car rolling up behind her again. It never came, and as she struggled forward without looking, her foot sank into a sodden mound of soil. Sally clawed for balance at the slick fence post beside her, gasped, then fell into the muddy lake that consumed the track ahead of her.

    The world around Sally disappeared into a black sea. The tang of earth and rainwater soured her mouth. The slow chill that lurked in the water claimed her body. Motionless in the mud, she felt the urge to stay there forever float at the margins of her mind, a small whisper cutting through the ghastly howls. Pressing on seemed ridiculous when there was nothing ahead but rural roads reduced to swamps by the storm, and turning back was signing up for her own demise at her mother's infuriated hand. 

    Save for finding more puddles to swill in, there was nothing Sally could do.

    Suddenly, two pictures fell between the threads of Sally's thoughts, each one a scene so vivid she believed she had lived them before. The first was of her father and brother stranded among a clutch of lifeless sea rocks, their boat twisted to scrap metal by the storm, their bodies wracked with exhaustion and untreated wounds. After that scenario, a view of her mother followed, stranded in the shelter of the family's scarred cottage, burdened with knowledge of her husband and son's plight yet powerless to affect it. They were helpless. Sally was not.