My home is a hole, a hovel with moss blanketing the walls, with rich, earthy clots filling the gaps where the wind whispers in chilling draughts. Rats are my industrious roommates, making short work of the small stones and peat which I stuff into their tunnels, my useless attempt to evict them. Outside, the breeze is ever biting; the climate is constantly cool. The sea wolf skins keep me alive, if not entirely warm, never fully dry. The small fire, too, is essential to my survival; wheezing in puffs of luminous amber and belching black smoke. I never allow her flame to fade, her rock basin to fill with departed ash -- well, almost never. Typically vigilant, I have been known to slip in my duties during uninspiring times, to oversleep, to tempt finality to take me to her dark and unknown abode. It’s true: Over the years, I have lost three digits to the cold, one finger and two toes. But really, it’s no big fuss -- after all, they work well enough to tally my blessings.
Mine is not much of a life, but I do live, insomuch, anyways, as I avoid death. I “live,” so to speak, on the westernmost crags of a sea-buffeted island. As far as a man may walk, you’ll find my home. One step further and it’s the skerry sea a mile beneath a sandstone crag. Below, the sea wages war with ancient stone, a rock face pockmarked by salt and tide, waves and eddies. Inch by inch, storms claim the land, exposing the static forms of long-dead, mythical beasts. They are not what I’d call overactive conversationalists, but they make fantastic neighbors.
A day begins, no different from any other, and lo! the sun rises again -- thank the gods! But really, I’m not surprised. I slither from my bed of mildewed straw and waggle my stiff fingers over the dying flame. I arrange driftwood sticks in an upright cone and blow kisses into the dim, ruby embers. I breathe in smoke, cough and blink away the pain. My beard is singed, my eyelashes, too. Warmth… it is worth all the fuss.
Beyond the walls of my makeshift burrow, the warmth is gone, a bygone myth. A constant wind flaps at the sea wolf skins to venture up my leg. I shiver, turn with my back to the wind and piss --it does not take long to learn the importance of this method. I watch my urine fly as swift and free and caustic as a harpy. Distant black shapes dot the iron horizon --actual harpies. They begin their morning as I do: in hopes for a better today than yesterday, some fish to fill their bellies so they may stretch out their existence and do the same tomorrow.
This land is a beggar, kneeling before a stingy sea; a lovelorn rock that clings to its own foundations by a precipitous edge. The island is barren, its surface bereft of soil, and grass among the high ground won’t feed cattle. It is brittle, sparse, yet beautiful, laced in gold as it catches what little sun penetrates the ashen sky, the frequent, foreboding clouds.
My flax-woven sandals crunch the tortured ground beneath their fractured soles. I stand, I sway, I survey my limited world. I take stock of each stunted tree, every dwarfed yew and crippled ash. Like me, they yield to the salt-tinged gales. They stand, frayed bark and leafless, skeletal things more twisted than old crones. It would be generous to say they share the same exuberance as long-forsaken corpses, as mummified elders. While their roots mine the rock with little luck, lucky for me, their branches excel in feeding the fire.
There are few women on my island. No humans to speak of --let alone speak to. But a lonely man finds his comforts where he may. A lonely man will weave a woman from the stars, find her eyes in the night as they twinkle their affections down upon him. A desperate man will mold his mistress in the evening. He will assemble the slopes and curves of her form in the brightest constellations. Of course, the clouds often veil the stars. But what of it? The clouds, perhaps more than anything else, make the softest and sweetest of lovers.
No humans? No problem. I shout to the mermaids below, who bask in the sun on the rare days it shines, who screech and moan in strange, Neptunian songs, in saltwater dirges as palatable on the ear as rotten fish on the tongue. Sometimes I wait for the wind to die, wait hours in my eternal patience. Then, in that limited gap of infantile breeze, I aim my wad of chewed seagrass to fall upon the mermaid I fancy the most. Her matted hair becomes splotched in emerald goo, and her brief confusion before her fury is what I treasure most. She directs her fiery gaze at the sea wolves which howl and gnash at crabs, the teeming gulls, anyone and everything who may be to blame. Lastly, when I call out her name, a name I have bestowed upon her for myself, when I shout to her below: Mariana! Lo! Mariana. My dear! I am rewarded by her spirited anger, a zealous rage that she has offered only to me.
Her language is unknown to me --most guttural-- but a man knows curses when they are directed at him. She sends them up to me, one long strand of fevered oaths, and to her, I volley with my own strands of well-chewed grass. I cajole her attention, her lavishing maledictions. Oh, how I savour Mariana’s undivided, evil eye.
Eventually, the mermen come. They emerge from the surf on wild crests of white foam. Well-fed on ocean denizens, their bodies are robust --twice as muscled as mine. They pair with their mates, throw their brawny arms around the scaled waists of the mermaids. Longingly, I observe their slithering lust, their saltwater salacity.
My voyeurism is never quiet. I cannot contain my outward, vocal enthusiasm, my keen adoration for fish and flesh. The merfolk raise their scowls skyward, their barbed, coral-tipped tridents thrust up in my direction. Together, men and maid, they slur and shout from on their barnacled rocks. They hiss at me in heavy tides of Poseidon’s brine-soaked profanities.
But the joke is on them; their oceanic oaths are carried to sea on a sudden, westward wind. Yes, the joke is on them; they cannot get me while I am atop my promontory. High upon my barren island, no one can reach me. No one at all.
Up here, I am all alone.