By Tom Hadrava
The waves differ.
There are snappers and crushers, there are sneaky ones and standing masses of water-tentacles.
The fighters attack them with swords and long pikes, their skin glistening with sweat and salt-water. They get soaked, toppled over and beaten. Sometimes they charge and are engulfed by the greyish waters. Still they push the sea back. Every day, the villages along the coastline send their best men. Every inch of sandy land is worth fighting for.
With dawn, the waves are tame and keep their heads bowed. The water recedes. It leaves behind drying sand and white stones shaped as skulls.
Waves as soldiers, fighters, warriors. Totally appropriate, and easy to imagine. I thoroughly enjoyed the story.
Thank you for a nice comment, I am glad you liked it!:)
Very vivid, splendid imagery. I could almost “hear” the sounds–the clash of battle. Very good story.
Thanks for your kind words!:)
Exciting to read but I didn’t ‘get it’. But I don’t get jokes or creepy either. How can dying in the water claim land? How can the dead be reduced to skulls overnight? I am not a critic, just a reader trying to learn. Great pun though in the title of John Steinbeck’s ‘Of Mice and Men”. Great imagination too. I think the flaw is mine! Sorry.
Never mind!:) This piece is largely symbolic. The waves could be alive, to enhance the fantastic element a little further. Men from coastline villages battle them, to push the sea back. In this sense, it´s about the ebb and flow (only in this particular point of view, these cycles need to be fought out). It could also be seen as a metaphor with the waves being only seemingly alive and the story describing a hard-fought battle that the people making their living close to sea have to go through every day (or went through in the past, see below).
The skulls could only be stones, of course, or real skulls of previous warriors. This implies the passage of time and the fact that this cycle has been going on for years/centuries/eons (as well as the hints at dated things such as medieval or pre-medieval weapons).
I could go on because I love ANY kind of sea imagery or symbolism and I think there´s even more to this piece but I hope this clears some of it to you and perhaps provides some food for thought, too… which should be the primary aim of any piece of literature, I think:)
Will never die where the see meets the soul.