Each day at slack water she scours the tideline. Some days the sea gifts her glass – blue, green, brown or white – milky and opaque like the eyes of the sailors claimed by the ocean. Sometimes she finds bleached, knobbly finger bones of coral, and shells as small and pink as babies' thumbnails or convoluted like a man's ear. Each day she examines her treasures for signs of her lover, breathes a sigh of relief, and takes the pieces back to her shack among the dunes where she caches them carefully in an ebony chest. Today the sea honours her with a piece of driftwood, knotted and gnarled like the skeleton of some ancient sea creature, burred and burnished by salt and sand. On the horizon beneath scudding clouds, ships' sails billow, waiting for the high tide to carry her lover back to her. At the shack she takes out her treasures, washes each one with her tears for the sweethearts whose men inhabit the kelp forests beneath the waves, then suspends each frosted stone, polished pebble and pearly shell by a silver thread from the sea-sculpted branch. She hangs the makeshift chandelier on the veranda, where it twists in the wind, casting shards of refracted moonlight across the dunes, a beacon to guide her lover home. She takes him to her bed, and after, when he is sleeping like the dead, she removes the heart from his chest and hangs it from the driftwood, ruby droplets phosphorescent in the night. Surf thunders onto the beach, pounds the sand in frustration, but he is hers for eternity; the sea can never claim him now.   --- Hilary Ayshford is based in rural Kent in the UK. She writes flash fiction and short stories and is currently working on her first novel. She prefers music in a minor key and has a penchant for the darker side of human nature.

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It swallowed her. The pain engulfed Marie whole, like a triskelion of emotional, physical, spiritual agony. She had stopped asking questions. There were no answers to be had. There was no why, and no ...

Overview and guidelines for the Best Small Fictions annual series, published by Alternating Current Press.

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