Publication Celebration! Part One of Three

To celebrate the fact that the Lit Mag is done, I'm posting the three things that I have published in the former. First one is called "The Sea of Ashes," and if you can determine what it means, let me know. xD I still haven't figured it out.

The Sea of Ashes

There was once an ocean here in this standing place. I remember its waves which nibbled at my toes, telling stories of distant shores and fantastic other lands; its fresh-scent foam, the breeze laced with brine. We went swimming in the water and found shells in the sand, dancing across oiled feathers and blackened baby bones.

Oceans don’t drift away; they burn. They rage. This ocean blazed many months ago. This beach turned to glass, twisted and transparent, rising and falling like soft-lifting silk. The waves tore over each other, spiraling pinwheels of light as far as the eye could see. The earth echoes an anthem of burning; do you hear it?

Now the salt has been replaced with ash. It feels like a funeral, a great cremation of the entire earth’s teardrops. Listen quietly: you can hear a hymn whispered in the white. Embers lead a procession, and the birds speak a eulogy, but there are no tears. They, too, are ashes.

I can’t tell you what color your eyes are now, or what the sky looks like. Grey isn’t a color. But here is something I do know: you can see the earth’s heart today, under our feet. It is red, an anger, and it pulses and dances as though it is alive. If you look just right, you can see through the world, through the center to the other side. It is a great glass globe, an ornament on a cosmic Christmas tree.

Can you smell the smoke? On a certain day, you can still feel it on your tongue, but it might be the people, too. It didn’t take long for them to come creeping from their holes, the people. The fish-corpses hadn’t even finished rotting before the concrete went down. People couldn’t wait that long. They needed something familiar, something to hold them close and comfort them. All they had was cold, dead asphalt.

The moon is pulling strong today. It longs for something to hold, just as it once plucked at the waters like symphony strings. All it has left to cling to are the people, the fish-corpses and concrete. I hope someday it will pull me away with it, and I shall dance in moon ash to feel at home. Perhaps the stars will have stories to tell, of distant worlds and fantastic places.

Perhaps the moon was an ocean, many millions before, and the smoke caused the earth to weep an ocean. Perhaps the sun, too, and the stars are oceans, and soon we will spin in an eternity of glittering glass spheres, chiming in perfect harmony as we dance around each other and spread ocean ashes like snow, until the dark universe is coated white.