Read More: A brief Q&A with Charlotte d’Huart
Lars is loping up the garden path toward me, face flushed, smile expectant, and I know he’s seen the whale.
Catching his breath, he leans down to kiss me on his way inside, stamping sweat on my lips that I wipe away. I hear the squeak of the faucet through the open window behind me, some loud gulping and a theatrical sigh. My jaw tightens.
“So you know that other beach that’s up past all those rocks?” There’s a beat while he waits for a response. I give none and he continues anyway. “I ended up running all the way up there just now, and there’s this dead whale that washed up yesterday. Got hit by a boat.”
I twist sharply in my chair to face the window. “Wait, how do you know?”
“How do I know what?”
I try not to snap at him. “What you just said. That it was hit by a boat.”
“Oh, they were all talking about it down there, the ones who do whale necropsies.” The way he says that last word is boastful, like he just learned it but is passing it off as established vocabulary. He refills his glass. “It’s pretty wild,” he says between more loud gulps. “How they opened it up. It’s like it’s inside out.”
I turn back around and wince at the sunlight jittering across the sea, a dull ache spreading from the tops of my eyes, and I think back to this morning, when there were clouds slouched low in the sky, and the coastline was blurred with mist. I’d woken up at four, after a twitching, shallow sleep, and had lain there watching the grey light coax out the contours of the bedroom, Lars there with his back to me, making the unguarded groans of one fully at rest. I knew my sounds wouldn’t wake him, but I feel uneasy when I’m up early in a sleeping house, and so I left, out into air heavy with ocean spray, following the road that hugs the bluff above the beach and descends into town. I passed a few people—a man delivering goods to the cafe, a woman walking her dog, a couple of guys in wetsuits unloading surfboards from their truck. We all acknowledged one another, in a way that made me feel like an imposter. They thought I was one of them, but they’d all chosen the morning; I’d surrendered to it.
I walked onto the beach, leaning into the wind and the soft sand, my calves seizing with the effort. The tide was low, and I headed out to the wide, glassy ribbon of firmer sand, then made my way north, sidestepping the uprush of stronger waves, leaving footprints that faded as soon as they’d formed. The beach halted at a rocky outcrop a couple of miles up. The waves were hanging back, the sand around the rocks smooth and the type of dark, wobbly brown that looks ready to swallow you whole. I navigated the rocks slowly, stumbling for footholds, my hands stinging with cold, eyes level with little tide pools and strands of slicked-down seaweed.
The beach on the other side was wide and long like the last, and similarly littered with tree trunks polished into soft grey, charred craters of old bonfires, and tangles of rubbery kelp. But there was also a large grey mass that, at first glance, I assumed was a rock. It was only when I’d clambered down and squinted again through the wet wind that I saw the sheen of the mound, the ridge of backbone that tapered and then widened into a tail that etched a smooth curve in the sand.
I looked around. I was alone. I recalled videos I’d seen of beached whales being rescued by crowds of locals, and I wondered if this one was still alive. I approached cautiously, imagining it writhing awake, knocking me back with that great slab of tail. I remembered a whale-watching tour I’d taken as a child with my parents, tourists cheering as an enormous tail unfurled from the water in slow motion, shedding droplets like diamonds, before descending and splitting the skin of the ocean with a loud crack.
Nearer the body, I stopped and hugged my jacket to me, wiping strands from my face that got flung right back. One of the whale’s flippers was already partially submerged in the sand. Its mouth was open, its huge lump of tongue slack between the long lower jaw and upper teeth. I leaned a little closer, over the blotchy head encrusted with barnacles. I imagined the patterns—the dabs of discoloration, the scattering of scars and barnacles—as tree rings or a fingerprint, a distinct tapestry that told the creature’s story, its journeys and traumas. I wanted to reach out and place my hand on it, but to do so seemed arrogant. I crouched down by its lower lip, and took in the massiveness of the body, powerful despite its laying there slumped, defeated, mouth ajar. Its eye was small, enfolded in creases of skin, a little dark pool like those I’d seen in the crevices of the rocks. I looked for something human in the eye, some recognizable expression. But there was nothing familiar—nothing at all, in fact. Just a limp blackness. It seemed wrong for that eye to still be open, as though I were peering into a one-way mirror. I wished I could close it, and thought of the eye on the other side, squashed into the sand.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. Lars was calling me. I let it go to voicemail and put it away, stood up, and walked towards the dunes. I glanced back several times before the dunes blocked my view, feeling something like sadness, except the sadness was far away, like the echo of a stone flung into a well.
As I walked back, along the road, I thought about that day with my parents, how that afternoon we’d gone to the beach to swim, and how when I’d put my head underwater, I could hear the distant wails of whalesong. I stayed like that until my eyes were red and my lungs rattled with seawater, holding my breath as long as I could over and over, flapping my arms to keep from bobbing to the surface, absorbing as much of that sound as possible. I remembered hearing in their songs the suggestion of something both expansive and intimate, a call that I knew was not addressed to me but that seemed like an invitation anyway. Thinking back, as I walked down the road, with the mist dissipating under the wakened sun, I supposed that what I’d heard in the whalesong was not just the promise of possibility, but also, in my innocence, its boundlessness.
“Did you hear what I said?” Lars is standing over me again, water in hand. Without thinking, I tell him I saw the whale this morning, and he frowns with something between confusion and disappointment. “Oh. How come you didn’t mention it?”
I shrug and squint out at the sea, but feel guilty for my dismissiveness and turn back to him. “I didn’t really think about it.”
“Well, you should see it now that it’s all opened up. It’s really something. Why don’t we walk down there later, before dinner?”
“Oh… I don’t know, I’m not sure I’m up to it. Besides, I already walked all the way down there earlier.”
“We can drive!” He tugs playfully on my earlobe. I look into his eyes and I wonder, were he to shut them, if I’d be able recall their exact shade. When we were first together, I’d stare into them as though I were decoding runes, the same way I’d trace my fingers over the divots and bumps of his freckles and scars, memorizing their origins, soaking up their significance. Observing him now, I realize I can’t recall how he got the little scar above his left temple.
“Ok,” I say, catching his hand. “Lets go down there later.”
We pull into the parking lot a little after five, and I’m surprised to find it almost full. When we clear the dunes, I see that there’s a crowd around the whale, their excitement shimmering above them like heat. Lars takes my hand and we walk over. He grins at me.
“Looks like word got out. Pretty cool though, huh? What did I tell you?”
The flesh of the whale has been sliced away in sheets and pulled back to expose its insides. Some of the sheets are still attached, like strips of a half-peeled banana. Other chunks are cut away and scattered about—grey and pink cubes that look unmistakably blubbery. A guy in a blue parka is standing next to one, looking down at it with a little smile. He kicks it, and it gives a heavy shudder.
We stop by the belly, and the stench floods my nostrils. People around us are making exaggerated gagging noises, eyes glittering with thrill above their covered mouths. The intestines are mauve and green and pink, twisted all together, alternately swollen and crumpled, tumbling outwards in spirals like garlands. The arched ribs and knobbed spine are caked in something dark and sticky.
Up by the head, the ocean breeze snatches the smell away. Shallow sheets of waves are lapping at the whale’s back and the dome of its head, now missing the lower half. The tongue is exposed, that weird whitish lump that doesn’t look organic, and its teeth seem oddly soft, feathery, like palm fronds. There are more barnacles encrusted in the skin than I remember, more of those milky blotches. A man squats down and runs a hand across the skin, pausing to pick at a barnacle like he’s scratching off a label, and I glance at the whale’s eye as if to catch its gaze, as if to acknowledge its humiliation, to distance myself from these people’s irreverence. But the eye has been cut out, leaving nothing but an empty square.
There’s a sudden screech, and a commotion down near the tail, where a group of teenagers has been taking selfies with the whale. One of the boys is chasing a girl with something in his hand. The others stand there laughing.
“Don’t you fucking dare! Get away from me!” The girl shrieks. He yells and jumps and throws what looks like a piece of the flesh at her feet.
“Oh my god you’re such an asshole!” She starts chasing him in return. One of the other girls walks up onto the tail and poses for her friends, arms raised high. She scampers back over to inspect the photos and cackles, head thrown back.
Lars looks to the kids and back at me and rolls his eyes, and then he takes out his phone. “What are you doing?” I ask, even though I know full well what he’s doing.
“Taking a photo.”
“Why?” I prod, barely stifling the contempt in my voice. He snaps away, oblivious, and I look out at the sea, trying to fill my head with its sound so that there’s no room for the chatter and squeals of the crowd or the rustle of Lars’s jacket as he photographs.
We have dinner at the same brewpub where we’ve had dinner the last several nights. Wherever we go, even during a brief getaway like this, Lars behaves as though we’re regulars, settling in, making friends effortlessly. He’s got that knack, the way some people do, but no matter how often I see it in motion, I’m always confounded by its mechanics, the way I can return from a trip to the restroom to find him chatting with someone that he’ll introduce by name, the way he shares a joke with strangers in an elevator, becomes buddies with bartenders and airplane neighbors. I remember a time when I admired it, wondered whether some of his magic would rub off on me. Now I resent the way he forces people onto me, requiring my engagement and small talk.
He’s chatting away now with the server, Caitlin, whose name I only remember because he greeted her as we arrived. She’s flirting with him, but subtly enough that I’d seem paranoid to mention it. She keeps throwing little comments in my direction as gestures of inclusivity. I return the smiles, respond when I have to. There was a time when I would have bristled at her flirting, but now it’s mostly the effort of the chat that bothers me. There’s lingering jealousy, I suppose, though it’s unclear whether it’s truly jealousy or whether it’s pride, a reluctance to be seen as the tired baggage of a lively man who can’t resist some adorable server’s wholesome charms.
Lars starts telling her about the whale, showing her the photos as she leans in close, while I sip my beer, leaning forward also, not so much to remain in the conversation, but because I’m afraid that if I lean too far back into the leather banquette, that I’ll see things from far away, distant and framed, like a scene from which I’ve been erased. I look up at Caitlin, assuming she’ll be giggling or wincing in disgust, but she’s not.
“That’s so sad,” she says. “There have been a bunch of whales washing up like that, all up and down the coast.”
I instantly feel myself soften toward her, and I ask if she knows what’s causing it.
“I’ve heard stuff like they’re hungry and can’t find enough food,” she tells me. “And that some of them are disoriented and get hit by ships. Something about how the boats interfere with how they communicate.”
I don’t know what to say in response, instead imagining a whale skinny with hunger, knocked aside by the towering prow of a container ship with a muffled clang, sinking, spinning toward the seabed like a sycamore leaf.
“Aw, that is kind of sad,” Lars chimes in. “Climate change. Scary stuff.”
When Caitlin leaves, a silence settles, and I trail my finger through the condensation on my glass. After a minute of looking around and making exaggerated sighs of contentment, Lars looks at me. “Hey, is everything ok?”
I answer too fast: “Yeah, of course, why?” I smile at him.
“I dunno, you seem off. You’ve been super quiet today. The last couple of days, actually.”
I keep smiling, and look away as though I’m collecting my thoughts. But there’s nothing to collect, no answer to his question. How do I tell my husband that I feel as though I’ve been hollowed out? Not in some raw, messy way, but clean and final, like popping a yolk out of a boiled egg, leaving the empty shape of its former contents. Or maybe that center, that essential part of me, has been replaced, with something equal in weight but different in substance, like Indiana Jones swapping out the treasure for a bag of sand.
“I just haven’t been sleeping well,” I say eventually.
Lars turns down the corners of his mouth to make a frowny face at me. “Have you been taking those pills that Julian gave you?”
“Jesus, how many times do I have to tell you? They don’t fucking work.” I haven’t raised my voice, but my anger catches me off guard. It feels oddly relieving, something solid to cling to. But I don’t like arguing, especially in public, so I say no more and look down, feeling the pins and needles from that jolt of anger.
Caitlin puts the food down in front of us, and we grin up at her idiotically, then slide back into silence. I’m not hungry, but Lars plows through his meal, like always. No matter his mood, his appetite is never compromised, nor his ability to sleep, to continue with whatever task is at hand. I can feel his attention has moved away from me, and so I let myself watch him.
When we were first dating, he would sit beside me rather than across the table, the way normal people do. He said he liked the proximity better. It initially felt awkward, but by the end of our second date, after we’d had drinks and had ducked into a late-night diner for burgers, I’d found it charming. I liked the confidence of his preference, the way I could relax without the directness of a head-on gaze, could feel like when he’d turn to face me that it was truly because he wanted to see me. He’d picked up the pouch of fries from his tray and offered it to me, smiling at me in a way that seemed like a secret. I drew a fry from the packet like I would a cigarette from its case and, laughing, drunk, silly, did my best Lauren Bacall impression, tilting my head down and lowering my voice: “Anybody got a match?” When he kissed me, it tasted like salt and grease and beer, just like so many high-school and college kisses, yet his hand on my face felt so authoritative that, for the first time, I didn’t feel like a girl getting kissed, but a woman, with all the assuredness that the word promised.
Now he’s sitting across from me, piling food on his fork in his particular way, making sure he has a little bit of everything. Like reclaiming the meaning of a word that’s been repeated into nonsense, I try to locate the security I should feel in the familiarity of his habits. If I think hard enough, maybe, I can restore some meaning into our lost language, but the words catch on the tip of my tongue, and all I can do is ask him how his food is. He’s annoyed, and so he makes a little grunt and keeps on eating. I can feel the words sliding back down my throat and I try one more time.
“It’s not that I’m unhappy,” I start. He pauses, puts his fork down, and waits for me to continue.
“I don’t know what’s the matter with me. Everything’s fine. Really. I just… I’ve been thinking about this time in middle school, when I was in a play of The Wizard of Oz. I was playing Dorothy on one of the nights, and these two other girls were playing her the other two nights. You know, sharing performance nights, so that more than one girl could feel special for getting the best part. Anyway, I was Dorothy number one, but I knew everyone else’s lines back-to-front as well, so I would do that thing in rehearsals where I’d mouth along to everyone else’s words, like I wanted to prove that I knew the script better than anyone else. But then the girl who was playing the tin man got sick, and it was right before opening night, so they made me play the tin man instead, for all three nights, since I had made a point of knowing all the words, and they gave my part to one of the other Dorothys.”
Lars is frowning at me. “So you were pissed they gave your part away.”
“No. Well, I mean, yeah, I was upset. But I remember the worst part wasn’t being robbed of the leading role, but a sense that I’d brought it on myself by trying to play everyone’s part. I was embarrassed that I’d made a show of knowing everyone’s lines.”
“I don’t get what this has to do with anything.”
“I know it sounds weird. I’ve just been feeling this distance lately, this feeling of being removed, and it reminds me in some way of the feeling I had then. I wish I could explain it better…”
Lars slides his hand across the table. “You’re probably just feeling weird from not sleeping,” he says to me softly, kindly. “I know that can put you in a weird headspace. Maybe you can make an appointment with Julian when we get back to the city.”
My hand lies limp in his. I think of the whale tongue. “Maybe,” I smile, and lean all the way back into my seat.
He starts taking my clothes off when we get back to the house. He’s working fast, in a way that I know means he’s not eager for me specifically. I wonder if he’s thinking of Caitlin. I don’t want to be touched this way tonight; I don’t like the hard line of his jaw against my neck or his scrabbling hands at my shirt. But backing away would require an excuse, and to slow him down would require engaging more fully, so it’s easier to just go with it. Finally my body responds in the way that he’s expecting, and I’m relieved at the pretense. As long as I can mouth along to the words, I think, it’ll all be ok.
Afterwards, Lars falls asleep instantly. His arm lays across my stomach, and I feel queasy from the pressure. I try closing my eyes, but I have to squeeze them together to keep them shut. I look around the room instead, my eyesight adjusting to the fizzing dark, counting pinpoints of light—blue, green, white, white, blue. An LED constellation. Breathe in two three four, out two three four five… I can never get the exhale as long as they say it should be. I can hear, in the distance, the white noise of the sea, and I try to focus on it, let the sound fill my head like liquid, let it catch and disperse my thoughts like flotsam. Close your eyes, scan the body, relax the toes, the fingers, the belly, the neck… Lars lets out a snort and my eyes fling open again, the sound of the ocean gets sucked back into the night, my body tenses. Against my better judgment, I look at the time. 01:03. Plenty of time still to get a decent night’s sleep, but I know if I keep laying here like this, sleep will never come. I could read or watch TV, but I don’t want to be here, in this quiet house where I don’t belong. I put on my shoes and my jacket, and grab the car keys from the kitchen countertop.
It’s chilly out, but the mist that had tumbled back in that evening has cleared, revealing a big sky washed out in the light of a bloated moon, and the wind has subsided, leaving one of those breezes that trickles down the back of your neck. I drive, without music or radio, wary of letting sound into the car, as though doing so might break something other than the silence. I drive through the sleeping town, then back along the road I walked down this morning, almost missing the turnout for the beach hidden among the black trees. The gate to the parking lot is closed, so I leave the car there and walk, following the shimmery sound of the sea just beyond the dunes. The moon is bright enough to light my way, turning the sand pale like salamander skin. From the top of the dune I can see the ocean stippled with silver, and I can make out the shape of the whale, still far away across the wide beach, a dark space in the night, a hole where something else should be. I remember learning about the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, how it ripped a piece from the sky and how, if you were to have looked up, before being burned into vapor, you’d have seen a chunk of blue missing, a gaping window into space in its stead.
Not all disasters are so sudden, so impressive. What of those mundane catastrophes? The ones that creep along for years before you look up and see how far from everything you’ve drifted. There’s no moment of collision, no ship smashing your head in, no rock splitting your sky—merely a moment of realization. I’m realizing now that, somewhere along the way, I tied a thread to some part of my life and kept walking, letting the thread unspool, certain that, if I erred too much in my journey, I could follow the thread back and set off anew. But here I am, thread slack in my hand, and the path indiscernible, both behind and ahead.
There’s laughter down the beach, and I see a group of six or seven walking in my direction, the light from their phones jumping about. There’s music, too, pulsing from tinny speakers. As they approach, I recognize them as the teenagers from earlier that day. They stop near the whale, and I watch as, ordering one another about, they hollow out a hole in the sand and drop armloads of objects into it, followed by the spark of lighters and a few tentative licks of flame. One of the boys throws something on the fire, and it roars upwards, spitting sparks, sending the group leaping backward, screaming with excitement and indignation. The music is turned up, and they’re singing now, dancing around, cartwheeling. There’s another collective yell and, after a delay, an offshore wind hits me with the smell of decay.
The firelight dimly reaches the body. I can make out the chunks around it sticking out of the shallow waves, the wet ribs, the spoiling bulges of its insides. How long, I wonder, until it’s stripped bare? Until the crabs and gulls and sea lice have picked off every strand, chewed that tough skin into an oily pulp that will dissolve into the water, leaving behind a dirty foam, and then nothing. What will remain then? A sinking, looted skeleton, so far removed from its original form that it won’t be a whale any longer, but a curiosity. A pile of bones.
There’s a figure coming toward me in the dark. It’s one of the girls from the group. Her head is bowed as she jogs up the dune, and I can’t see her face, just long hair swaying, a flapping, oversized jacket, a strip of midriff between a striped top and loose jeans. It’s not until she’s a few feet from me that she stops, breathing heavily, and looks up.
“Woo!” she exclaims. “I shouldn’t have run up that!”
I don’t know what to say. She strides toward me.
“Mind if I sit?” She flops down a little to my left, legs splayed, feet bare. She looks over and smiles a big smile, with big white teeth, but it feels like a deflection, something thrown at me while her narrowed eyes size me up.
“You guys having a party?” I ask, cautiously.
“Something like that,” she says, shrugging in a way that uses her whole body.
“I was sent up here on a mission!” she adds, mock-regally. “We saw you sitting up here. We wanted to see if you were a creep.” The group is still yelling and dancing around, but I can see a couple of them looking back up at us.
“Well, sorry to disappoint.”
“I haven’t established you’re not a creep,” she shoots back, casually. I’m taken aback; I never would have spoken that way to someone as a teenager, with that kind of relaxed insolence. I wouldn’t speak like that now.
She reaches inside her jacket and pulls out a miniature bottle of vodka, cracks the top open, downs most of it, then offers the rest to me. I decline, a little too politely. She heaves another full-body shrug. “I have more,” she says. “But I don’t want them to know, otherwise they’ll just drink it all. And none of those assholes ever bring any.” She leans toward me, and I notice the tips of her blonde hair are dyed pale blue. “So, I’m just gonna sit here a minute with you and drink while I can.”
Snapping her head back, she finishes the bottle, and flings it behind her. I feel myself shrinking at the brazenness of the gesture. She takes out another bottle, struggles with the cap, and then, from her pocket, retrieves a Swiss army knife. She slices through the prongs securing the cap and, after another sip, stares up at the moon, and I stare at her, at the unassuming beauty of her profile, at her skin that’s baffling in its newness, its lack of creases and blemishes. She’s not wearing makeup, and, bar the blue ends, her hair is unstyled. She seems entirely at home in herself, sitting in her body the way one curls up in a familiar armchair. At that age, I was so concerned about how I appeared to others, every item of clothing, every stroke of makeup the result of careful deliberation. Even now, I feel aware of my tangled hair, tied up in a stringy ponytail.
She turns her head abruptly, and I’m caught in my stare. Her eyes travel over me.
“You alone out here or what?” She asks after a moment. The question makes me nervous, and I say no, instantly regretting the obvious lie.
“Really?” She looks around, exaggeratedly. “You sure about that? Sure don’t see anyone.”
I feel my face turning red. “Oh I thought you meant here in town. I’m here with my husband. But I’m here here alone.” My sentence hangs stupidly in the air.
She blinks slowly, eyelids heavy but eyes sharp, and smiles archly. “Oh, ‘here here.’ I see.”
Her jacket slips down off her right shoulder. She neither reacts nor breaks her gaze with me. I don’t know where to look.
“How old are you?” I blurt out.
“Why, you gonna call the cops on me and my delinquent friends?” She cackles. “How old are you?”
I’m trying to figure out how to respond when the wind picks up again, a cold gust that brings with it, once more, the smell of the whale. I shudder.
“It usually smells much worse,” she whispers dramatically, widening her eyes for effect.
“What do you mean?”
She switches back to a normal voice. “I mean the other whales. The ones that’ve been washing up dead around here. This is the fourth in the last year, you know. The first one was like two hours north, but—” she drops back down to the dramatic whisper. “I think they’re getting closer.”
I wonder if that’s true. I picture a row of bodies strewn along the coast, a rotting procession that culminates here, at this beach.
“I should probably come clean,” she continues. “We’re here for the ritual.”
She says it so matter-of-factly that it barely registers. “The ritual?”
“Yeah, we do it for all of them, the whales. Me and those guys.” She points down at her friends, still prancing around the fire, singing. It sounds like the same song has been playing since they arrived.
“What is it exactly that you guys do?” I ask, quietly.
“A few things. There’s the fire, obviously. You can’t have a ritual without fire. And we say some shit to, like, acknowledge the whale and stuff. And we play a game, as a sort of tribute.”
Her voice is light, but she’s still looking at me in that way that makes me feel exposed. A look like the wind that finds the gap between my jacket collar and the nape of my neck. There’s something unnatural about the rhythm of her movements, the way she erupts with motion before icing over with stillness. Nothing moves now but the tips of her hair in the breeze. Trying to keep my voice light as well, I ask her what sort of game.
“Oh just like a little game of truth or dare. Except with us, it’s truth, dare, or sacrifice. And it’s for real. You have to actually give something up. And everyone has to contribute. Come to think of it,” she says, tapping her index finger to her lips as though thinking deeply, “since you’re here, you’ll have to take part as well.”
The stench of the whale has crawled up the dune and wrapped itself around us, and it’s making me lightheaded. I want her to stop looking at me, I want to get up and leave, but I’ve been pinned to the sand. I attempt a playful tone: “In that case, I should probably get out of here while I have the chance.”
She says nothing, her eyes dark. Then she snorts. “Well, someone’s a bore.”
She’s teasing me, and I worry that she has smelled my fear. She delivers the line with that young rudeness from before, with the relish and thoughtlessness of someone tearing into fruit, and I can feel a rush of resentment spreading through me. It warms me, and even though I know it’s what she wants, I stop clutching my jacket to me, sit a little taller, and say, “Fine, but I’ll need some of that vodka.”
She makes an exaggerated impressed face and throws the little bottle to me. I tip it back and, for a second, consider tossing it over my shoulder like she did; instead, as I’m about to pocket it, she opens her palm to ask for it back.
“So,” I say, “How do we do this?”
She reaches into her jacket again, and takes out the knife and a crumpled dollar bill. “Ok, we need three objects. Bottle is truth, dollar is dare, knife is sacrifice—ooh!” She raises an eyebrow. “That’s kinda perfect, isn’t it?”
My heart flutters, but I keep my eyes down, hoping she doesn’t see my trepidation. “Now what?”
“You have to close your eyes.”
This time I cant help but look up sharply. “What, don’t you trust me?” She purrs.
I force an exaggerated sigh. “Alright,” I say, and shut my eyes.
I hear some scuffling in the sand between us, and then silence. I wonder if she’s looking at me, but I make myself keep my eyes shut. A few moments later, she tells me to look. There are three mounds in the sand in front of me. “Pick one,” she says.
I consider them before pointing to the one on the left. “You sure?” she teases. I give her a wary look, and she smiles, tosses her hair over one shoulder, buries her hand in the sand, and pulls out the pocket knife.
Of course, I think. Her eyes are alight now, and she holds the knife in her palm as though weighing it.
“Sacrifice,” she whispers, and fixes me with a look of mock horror.
“Ok, what does that mean?” I attempt one of her insouciant shrugs.
Slowly, dramatically, she opens the blade. My heart starts knocking against my chest. “Give me your hand,” she says. […]
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Charlotte grew up in France and England and lived as a teacher in Hanoi and Buenos Aires before settling in San Francisco, where she works as an editor, writes, and is constantly preoccupied with what to cook next.
Read More: A brief Q&A with Charlotte d’Huart