Chapter 3: Icky Drinks

Again I wake, and again it is the dark of the cave and outside is the moonlight. But the body aches with the fatigue of a million runs and my chapped lips taste of something different, like sea, like the soft water having evaporated leaving a cracked land of lips. Aching. Exhausted. 

Outside, sitting on a ledge, the old naked man watches the sea. From the entrance of the cave, he could’ve been some white rock, tooth-like. But as I emerge from the cave he turns, waves me over. I sit next to him, watch the sea. 

And we sit. Its starlight, the moon gone. I can count whitecaps on the sea. My eyes feel so heavy, yet I’ve never seen so well at night.

He points to the horizon which the stars seemed to split the dark with a halo of dark blue, and he speaks, and it is clear that in whatever language he is speaking he is telling me about the land over there being the place that mattered. Maybe home. Maybe Hades. 

Then, he led me down to a plot of flat beach that’s blocked in by a small wall of jagged rocks fencing the sea while the other three sides are cupped by the shelves of stone.

He motions me to sit to watch. He takes a long staff, of what must have been driftwood, and goes down to the beach as the tide foams around the jagged teeth of the rock wall facing the sea. Then, he sets to digging. The skin of sand is pocked with little holes, and he digs between them. Pounding the stick, stabbing it into the skin of mud sends squirts of water, little fountains shoot up from the holes. 

Digging with the stick, he bends down like some supplicant to the night. He drops the stick and digs with his hands until he got to the squirting thin: a clam. 

Rather, clams. 

He tosses them like little stone to the a shallow and wide crevice of rock next to me that catches the clams like a bowl. And he starts again, the staff as digging bar, the bending and scraping with hands in the mud.