Cast Ashore — a novelette in 15 chapters
Cast Ashore: Chapter 1
The Message of the Sea
Each morning on an ebb tide, I get up at first light and hurry out to the beach, eager to read what the receding water has written in the night. On the flood, all I’ll find is a mess of trampled sand which the advancing surf is slowly wiping clean. So, it has to be the ebb.
I’m disappointed if an early tourist has sullied ‘my’ pristine beach with clumsy feet before I get there. Being first to receive the sea’s daily memos has become an obsession.
This morning, I am first: a good start to my Saturday. I trudge through the dry sand — deep, soft and sugary — to the wide band of damp, firm stuff down by the water’s edge that’s easier to walk on.
It’s shaping up to be a weird kind of day. The sky hangs low over a foaming sea. Out in Bass Strait far to the southwest a storm is churning the sullen water into a rage. The wild weather hasn’t reached us yet, but it’s coming: the big waves are its outriders.
Meanwhile the air is tepid, humid, still. Against my skin it’s curiously temperature-less, as if I were walking not across an exposed beach, but in a vast enclosed room suffused with light — maybe a gallery installation? From hidden speakers a white noise soundtrack swells and…
