Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part Eighty Six
They reached the northern beach head with that tense moment still held firmly between them. Felecia tried to understand that Jacqueline was old, not feeble, but still old. If Nana could become so set in stone, so obstinate, so terrified of change, why not her tortured and terrified twin? The superstitious foolishness of making gruesome offerings to the sea itself undid whatever thin threads there were for Felecia to try and build a bridge with Jacqueline in so much as what she chose to do during these frequent outings. Still, she also didn’t want the woman feeling as though she somehow thought less of her for her obvious, nonsensical yet harmless, eccentricities.
Felecia had at the ready the rough form of what words she had on offer as they cleared the last line of trees to the beach. She nearly ran into Jacqueline as the old woman stopped in her tracks.
The boat was obvious, leaning on its left side at the edge of the tide waters. Felecia had seen a few of them in the village during her time there. The sort of fishing boats her father and Phillip both remarked as “Yankee built” because they were the stoutest and most solid fishing vessels left around the island. The boat’s last coat of paint had been the same dark red as most of the boats and shacks in the village, now faded to pink by months of salt water exposure. The boat’s stout composure left it looking like a proud wreck showing off its weathered deck and splintered mast against the fading sun light.
Jacqueline was already lost in gibberish prayer to the nothing that waited out in the waves as Felecia pressed on, temporarily leaving her own heavy water skins and gear meant for the trek to the meadow. The boat laid out there in the surf and seemed to call to her. A boat she knew very well from her nightmares looked something terribly similar to the one on that beach. A boat being steered by a moron who knew nothing about the sea. A crew and captain of one yanking hard at a wheel in the wrong direction, his hands still covered in blood from the nights murderous exploits.
Felecia managed to get to the boat and began steadily examining it for damage as well as occupants before Jacqueline stopped her pathetic placations. The old woman managed to scrape up a good number of half rotten and sun cooked things to toss back into the sea along with her gibberish before she began hissing at Felecia. “That’s not on offer, girl! That’s just it showing off what it means to take back. You get away from there!”
Girl.
Nana made that word sound like a curse. Felecia never had a name when she did something that Nana truly disapproved of. Even when she wasn’t playing it up or performing in front of the help, Nana knew how to make that simple word turn into a slap just as hard as the real thing.
Felecia learned at a very early age to recognize and despise that word, to recognize everything in herself that was inquisitive, everything that was born from a sense of genuine wonder and bury it or kill it. The constant mention of her sex, before she even had one, made her loathe that as well. Her brothers drew just as much of Nana’s ire, certainly more, but they were always called by their name. Nana would howl their names through the halls of Rotary house and send tendrils of fear running through everyone and everything that breathed in the big house, but Felecia’s brothers always had names. Felecia was reduced to, Girl.
Felecia kept going, disregarding the old woman cursing at her while knee deep in the surf offering up to the ocean what it had already thrown away.