calder rusolki — d4m. [ wip ]

This story is of how my family tried to drown me.

If there’s ever been a family made from the harshness of sea-salt and the unkindness of waves combined, it would be the Rusolkis. We always have to belong to the sea first, everything else second – because what was more than neptune’s castle, the great blue? What was more important than shanties sang in honor of the sea-deities, feasts to the gulls that bore souls of sailors lost at sea?

This story is of how my family is sea-rotten.

This story is of how I wanted to escape from them.

This story is of how my grand escape plan fell apart and I ended up here in a darkened room, knees drawn up to my chest, and I can’t stop shivering.

It wasn’t supposed to go this way.

The plan was to get out at this monthly festival we did at the edge of the seaside cliffs in the night, when the waves would crest over the rocks and spray would catch in our hairs. I was ready, prepared, waiting for a chapter of my life that included small and delicate pleasures such as heavyset windows and baking pastries, such as feet on warm grass and hot summers, not fishes gutted on stone altars and seaweeds made into crowns and platters of raw meats to the gulls – nothing blue, nothing that reminded me of the cold, sinister sea. what a foolish idea, now that i’m pondering on it. Riptides never let go of what they catch, and so the Llyrs do, too.

They caught me in the house, hands half-buried in a sack full of clothes, another bag slung over my shoulder. They caught me, knew what I was doing, and then dragged me out to the sea with rocks tied to my feet.

It was tortuously icy, the waves.

They lapped up my legs as water but became ice as they sunk in my bones and I had never been too strong for a built-looking boy, never knew I needed to have strength enough to break free from the hands of my sea-maddened family that's trying to drown me. The thought makes me laugh. The sound carries itself across the cells richly. I can feel the water from the memory of the drowning even in this cell, pooling around my ankles.

Everything would have looked beautiful when I went under if my heart wasn’t beating out of my chest and I wasn’t being killed. Fractured moonlight on the water, the surface was a dizzying array of silver dots, dancing over the waves, over me, over my screaming mouth. The salt enters a moment later and it isn’t kind, it has never been. Tt floods the entire cavern of my mouth and chokes me. I scream but nothing truly comes out except sea-foam. and then, the darkness presses in.

But, it doesn’t steal me away in an instant. That would be too kind, too merciful for the sea. Instead, the salt-water claws down my throat and rakes at my lungs with its talons and it chokes and it chokes and it chokes. It feels akin to your insides being wrung dry. It feels akin to your insides burning, even though it’s all water, it’s all sea. I was drowning and on fire at the same time.

And then everything is black.

I knew I was alive again when I woke up to the smell of fish and salt, because if that was the afterlife, I would soon beg for a second death. “He’s breathing!” someone whispered then, and I saw shapes, struggling to coalesce as whole, mosaicked colors against a too blue sky. I coughed and twisted to lie on my stomach, my lungs water-logged and sodden.

Tt was fishermen who rescued me. Well, not rescued – found. I was lapped by to some nearby shore and so, in a way, it was the sea who rescued me, but it would never get its gratitude. I was not going to step foot on another shore or swim in another pond of water ever again. I would migrate, sneak out to where there were deep forests and wildflowers and clamors of birds amongst thick branches, somewhere warm and hearty.

But instead, here I was, in a cell, alone, because shortly after being rescued, as words rippled throughout our district, they took my family away for practicing strange occult religions, put me on a train and then a cell. It’s a way of saying there are no other gods except the Capitol, and a way of saying look at that strange boy, isn’t he so peculiar?

I can’t get the salt-water out of my skin.