By David Butler
A sea marbled like meat. A restless sea. You stop, and stop me, your eyes shaded and asquint. “There’s someone in there…”
“Where? I don’t see anything.”
“Look, there!” The wind tugs words like gulls out over the rolling sibilance. Our anoraks, loud in our ears.
“It’s not a person. That’s a buoy!”
“No! Beyond the buoy.” You grip my arm. “There, see?”
And there is something , not yet someone, tiny in the huge grey turmoil.
“It’s not,” I say again, less sure. Less sure of myself, too; and of us, with sea and wind and world enormous about us.
Incredible imagery. “A sea marbled like meat” is one of the best metaphors I’ve seen lately.
Hey, I really liked this! If 100-word stories are an impulse, then this one travels all the way from the primordial ooze.
This is a highlight: “And there is something , not yet someone, tiny in the huge grey turmoil.” Taking place in a “meat” sea, it’s a similar setting to the rotting deep where Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner found himself – life is struggling to tear itself from the amorphous immensity.
One wrinkle: I’m not sure of the sentence “The wind tugs words like gulls out over the rolling sibilance”. But the final paragraph, where a billion years of evolution threatens to simply reabsorb into the original matrix is wonderful.
Hats off to the imagery … and the menace. One of the best 101s I’ve read.