Member-only story
The Shore
She watches for his ship, but it may never come back.
It had been days since his last radio communication. She bit her nails to the point that she made her fingers bleed, but she didn’t pay any mind to the small hurts she had inflicted on herself. The pain was a burst of realization that she was still alive when so many out at sea had fallen into the depths, never to rise again.
His ship went out after a storm, and he told her it was a good omen that the winds had died down and the waves were calm. She wouldn’t have worried — he had at least a decade of manning his own fishing boat — but then there had been word among the townspeople that the waters were no longer safe. Warships had been spotted beyond the boundary. The war in the east, it seemed, had bled to the south shores.
And her fear knew a new name when one night she saw the horizon light up with sparks. She might have mistaken it for a summertime celebration when fireworks lit up the dark skies in their small port town. But this? No, there were no shouts of jubilation. She imagined others in their homes had seen the sky and started crying out for the madness of it all.
“Shara, we must go,” her father told her last night. “We can go over the border. It’ll take days, but we can’t stay here. We’re no better than animals waiting for their slaughter here.”
