The beach is devoid of humanity, save for the lone figure walking along the water’s edge. The gulls vie for her attention, their incessant squawking competing with the waves crashing angrily as if they do not want to make landfall.
The sand is firm beneath her step, as she walks, lost in thought. She stumbles as her toe hits a stone jutting out of the sand, its surface flattened by generations of waves over millions of years battering the stone, the same waves that perhaps carried it on a journey from its place of origin. It may be smaller in size, as the sea took the rough edges off it over the millennia, but the strength lies in its core, just like her strength is deep within her. She picks up the stone, uprooting a string of seaweed that had been trapped underneath, releasing the contradictory scent of rot and sea-salt. She rubs her thumb over the smooth surface of the stone, before pulling her arm back and flinging it back into the sea from where it came.
Standing, looking out at the sea, she said a silent prayer and with the toe of her boot began to draw a cross in the sand. Feeling hypocritical, however she continued with her toe from the arm of the cross, bring the line down and across inwards making instead a square with two lines jutting out.
Despite her prayer she could not help remembering him kissing her cheek, innocent but memorable, soft and fleeting like butterfly wings, the scent of his cologne invading her nostrils. Time was fluid, the memory was true. The moment could have happened years ago or moments before. The kiss was both a fact and an illusion. She had taken a vow before God and before her family. A vow until death released her.
With a sigh, she turned from the sea, the wind whipping at her nun’s habit as she made her way back to the convent.
Nico Mara lives in rural Ireland.
Patreon makes Every Day Fiction possible.
