Sand and Salt and Shells

A long, long time ago, there was a boy and a girl.

They lived in the sort of town that brushed right up against the ocean, as close as it could survive. They'd known one another since they were very young, and been thick as thieves despite the girl's increasing strangeness. She often spoke of storms of the sea and waves eating at the town so that they could take her, but she'd loved those sorts of legends since she was young and perhaps no one thought to take her seriously. After all, she'd always been the sort to daydream.

Just as everyone expected, when they grew into a man and woman, they were engaged and set to have a wedding right on the rocks of the coast. But two nights before the ceremony, in a huge storm that swept in from the sea and flooded streets in a matter of minutes, the woman disappeared.

The man was understandably distraught. He mourned, and the town mourned with him.

And then he started hearing the sea in his head, just the way that his soon-to-be wife had. It whispered in his ears like the softest of waves and the strongest of winds, warning him of an oncoming storm that no one else could see, and driving him out to the rock that he was set to get married on, where he could sit for hours and watch the sea. Everyone dismissed it as grief, and he rather thought the same, until the day the girl arrived.

He was sitting, staring at the waves as they crashed onto the rocks below him, until one rose up just a bit too high and a girl made of sand and salt and shells was suddenly sitting in front of him. The man scrambled backwards just a bit, before realizing that this girl had his fiancee's eyes.

"You want her back, don't you," said the girl, monotone, as the man slowly reached back towards her. "It's not hard, not really. She went a bit mad and threw herself into the sea -- sorry," she said as he winced, "-- and we tore her apart -- don't get mad, it's what we do to everyone -- but she didn't taste all that good and um, well, we've scattered her bits around the coast, but I figured I could help you put her back together. She'd be just like -- maybe not just like -- just like how she was before." As a token of -- the man wasn't sure -- the girl then reached up to her face, shuddered a bit, and pulled her eyes from her head. At this, the man jerked back, but she held out her hand and dropped them onto the stone. "Oh, no," she said when she heard them bounce. "I should have expected you'd not have grabbed them. Pick those up. They belong to your wife, after all."

Slowly, a bit in shock, the man reached forward and put the woman's eyes into his hand. They were cold and wet, and a bit squishy but not soft. It was rather repulsive.

"One more thing," said the girl. "Give me your hand." He did, reluctantly, and she placed a tiny pointed shell into his hand. It began to spin, and he watched, fascinated. "The shell will guide you to each piece of your girl," she said. "When you've gathered them all, return here and I will help you put her back together."

The man wasn't sure that he was ready for such a grisly task, but he nodded anyhow, then said "All right," remembering that the girl no longer could see him.

The shell first led him up the hill to his house (where he grabbed a bag to carry the pieces in) and then past it, to an abandoned well halfway up the mountain. How bits of the woman could get up here if the sea had eaten her, he wasn't sure, but the shell remained pointing stubbornly at the well no matter which way he turned. He steeled himself and began to unwind the rotting old rope that carried a bucket into the depths of the well, unsure that it would be able to hold the weight of whatever rested at the bottom.

When he pulled the bucket up, it carried sludgy water that no one in their right mind would drink, and the woman's left hand and forearm, seaweed pushed beneath the fingernails and wound around the wrist. Unsure whether he should wash it off, but sure that rinsing it in the slimy well water would make no difference, the man slipped it into his bag.

He found the other hand in a stream that rushed down to the sea, and was barely able to grab it from the bubbling currents.

The rest of her arms were between rocks that marched out to sea, and would have been washed away when the tide came in, had they not been so expertly wedged into the rocks.

He dug her teeth up from the soft gray sand beneath a pier, and her right foot from waterlogged soil at the edge of a river. Her left foot was in a stinking lobster trap behind a fish shop, and her left leg washed up from the tide right in front of him.

The man's bag was getting heavy now, but he still had three pieces to find.

The shell led him down the most dangerous stretch of coast, a place he had been warned away from since he was very young. Where the water lapped at his feet behind a swiftly eroding sea stack, he found the other leg, and in a cave on the headland, he found the remnants of her torso.

He crept back over the rocks, terrified of losing any piece of her. His bag dragged him down, the weight of a nearly whole adult woman inside of it, and he could barely use both hands at once for fear of losing the shell guiding him on. It was slow, scary going, and it only got worse once the tide turned.

Finally, soaked through to his waist and clutching tightly to the tiny shell, he made his way to the rock he'd wasted days on, the shell adamant that it was where he must go, despite the fact he still did not have the woman's head.

He sat down and laid out each of the pieces carefully, feeling a bit disgusting and hoping that no one saw him. He covered her with his jacket to protect her dignity, even though it was soaked and would reek forever of the sea.

"Looking for this?" said a voice behind him.

The sand-salt-shells girl was sitting behind him, his fiancee's head cradled in her lap. The man reached for it frantically, but the girl held up a finger. "Her head has to be the last piece, unless you want her to feel the pain of being put back together."

"How do I do that, then?" asked the man. He didn't want to put up with the strange girl's game.

The girl grinned, teeth looking like she'd stolen them from a shark. "Easy." She swept her hand into the ocean and pulled a couple teeth from the man's pile, dipping the roots of each of them into the seawater and sliding it into the woman's lifeless mouth. The man grimaced as he watched this. "The sea will glue her back together," said the girl. "It wants to bring her back to life. But you'll have to let it take its tithe."

"Is being dead in pieces for a week not enough of a tithe?" asked the man. He picked up a hand and forearm and lathered seawater onto its ragged stump, attaching it to the rest of its arm. It fell right apart.

"It takes its price from you both," said the girl.

"I'll pay, then," said the man, with a sinking feeling in his chest telling him that he really shouldn't pay.

The girl smiled again, toothier than ever before. The pieces of arm united for good this time, and bit by bit, the woman came back together. The man put her eyes in second-to-last, unsure whether she was alive at this point as he felt quite watched, and then slid her head onto her neck. He wiped over the seams with seawater until they faded and the woman opened her eyes. He didn't let her speak a word before sweeping her into his arms and feeling like all the windows inside of him had been opened and light was pouring in.

They were married the very next day.

Two days after the wedding, the man found a scale on his inner arm, and he found another the next day, and one more the day after that. His wife, who didn't really remember the weeks she'd been dead, didn't understand what they were any more than he did, and so he made his way to the only person who would.

"It's the tithe," said the sand-salt-shells girl. "It'll steal your breath, probably. You certainly won't be able to leave this town ever again, or at least not leave the sea. You might have to start taking saltwater in your tea, or bathe in the ocean every day. And it'll take you before your time. But at least she's back."

"Will it steal her life, too?" asked the man.

"Why would the sea feel the need to take her twice? Three times? It has had her since the day she was born," said the girl. A shell broke off of her arm as she dove back into the sea. The man picked it up, full of a compulsion he couldn't understand, and threaded it onto a necklace which he never once would take off. Perhaps it could protect him from whatever the sea wanted of him.