The Rocky Shore

Once you were a sailor. Tossed into stormy seas you battle in vain against current and rip-tide until your strength is spent and your body can contend no more against invisible foes. You tread water and wave and scream and pray for help which never arrives. Slowly you cease to struggle; accepting that you are going to die with the taste of brine on your tongue beneath the burning sun.

But you do not drown. The sun and rain sustain you as you float on the surface like a stunned fish. You aren't summoned down to the lonely depths. Perhaps Poseidon took pity on you or mighty Zeus preserves you to pull his brothers beard. Or perhaps this is your punishment for some unknown slight.

For decades you drift around the sea at the centre of the world. Numb to everything. Dead to the world. Through calm and storm as you patiently await the day when you will start the long descent into the abyss.

You float for so long that you almost forget you were once a man. A creature of the world that walked and ran. Sometimes you spy a ship on a far horizon and one dark night lights on a distant shore, and for a moment you remember the life you had once led, the boy you had once been so long ago on the island of Poros.

As the seasons pass your skin wrinkles and hardens until it is no longer the covering of a man. Barnacles attach themselves to your hide. Seabirds perch and nest on what was once your body. Forever floating, forever numb; you drift on beneath the curious stars.

Then across sand and surf the winds bring a song in the darkness, and something forgotten stirs deep within. So feint, so distant. You strain senses you have not used in generations to hear, and move limbs you had forgotten you possessed to move closer.

You see her from afar laying on the rocks. Dark skin glistening in the sunlight; black curls falling down her back. She calls out to you and you want her in a way you had forgotten possible. You desire her, yearn for her, and thrash and struggle against the sea. You force yourself closer, once more swimming against the tides. Your muscles ache and burn and saltwater fills your lungs and stings your eyes but still you battle onwards. Her song is calling you, reminding you that you were once a man and promising you life again.

You cannot resist her summons. You see her enthroned on the perilous rocks where so many men have met their end, but all your soul desires is to bury your head in her lap and listen to her song forever more.

You crash on to the lacerating rocks where land and ocean clash. Bloody and bettered by the merciless anger of sea you pull your broken inhuman body upright and stand before her. She smiles; her song your whole world now. You go to kiss her; she smiles and turns her head aside. You try to speak for the first time in a century, to declare your love for her but she places a finger to her full lips.

"Sometimes it is better this way" she tells you, before diving back into the deep and leaving you with nothing but the echo of her tinkling laughter. You stumble clumsily off the cruel rocks and into the gentle dunes and pine trees that lay beyond. The Siren has called you back to love, back to life. You might have perished on the rocky shore, but without her song you would surely have been lost forever.