Persephone

The Sea

He closed his eyes and heard the sea.

The slap slap slap of waves on the side of a boat, the silence of that vastness, that empty vastness.

He held his eyes closed and he could smell the sea. He could smell the salty copper of it around him.

He felt to his left and there was wood. He felt to his right and there was wood. He felt front and aft and again wood. He was afloat.

He opened his eyes and the light blinded him in a stark white blanket that slipped away to reveal a sea, a red sea. He span around. Sea. Everywhere he looked was sea. Red red sea like an ocean of blood.

He looked at his hand and it was healed. He looked at himself and he was clothed. He looked for the chair and there it was, behind him. He looked beneath his feet and he was on a raft, a raft made of three doors tied together and buoyed by barrels.

He blinked, blinked again. The raft was still there as was the sea and the chair and the sky, a blue sky high above him. He looked out across the sea of blood but there was nothing there, nothing on any horizon save blood, blood and more blood red sea.

‘She was here, somewhere here,’ he thought to himself in flashes like the slaps of the waves against the barrels. ‘I have to find her.’

He knelt to the sea, the blood red sea, and with an immaculate hand he began to paddle, to paddle and to push, to will and to work, to sweat and to toil and the raft, the boat of doors that sailed upon that ocean of blood, the ship that held him and the chair, steadily sailed toward an empty horizon, a blank nothing.

Toil and sweat. Blood and tears. Work and labour. Greif and pain. Paddle and push. Row and oar.

He and her. Her and him. Together they would be once more.

He had forgotten the madness, forgotten the empty mansion and the wild garden, the empty rooms and the wild woods. He had forgotten everything save the fact that she was not here, that she had been taken from him by the brutes hidden in clothes of white.

White as the snow on the mountain that rose from the sea before him and he took his immaculate hand from the blood red sea and stood on the raft of doors to peer at the mountain.

Raising a hand to cover his brow he leant back to see to the summit. Leaning and leaning and leaning as if he were a bridge, a bridge from where he stood to the foot of the mountain that reached, never endingly, up toward the summit, the sky and the clouds, the white snow where the men clothed in white had taken his wife. It could be only there.